I was invited by the World Financial Symposiums to Chair their Silicon Valley Growth and Exit Strategies for Software and IT Companies conference on May 14th. I invited Google, VMware, Verisign and Yahoo to sit on a buyers panel, and also invited some recent Corum clients to talk about their experience in selling their companies. Finally, I asked one of my favorite visionaries and commentators on the tech industry whose material I have been reading for nearly two decades to keynote the event. He graciously accepted and gave a prescient, far-reaching address. As salesforce.coms Director of Platform Strategies, Peter Coffee is tasked with expanding salesforces global footprint. As a veteran of many industry cycles he delivered acute insights into the peculiar evolution that is occurring in the cloud, in the current economic context of a global recession.