Corum is a platinum sponsor for the World Financial Symposiums, which runs conferences three times a year in Silicon Valley, New York and London. These events have always received great reviews from delegates. Delegates are the leaders of technology companies - smaller sellers and larger buyers; and executives from investment banks, venture capital and private equity - funders and buyers of technology businesses.

 

A month ago I chaired the first in a new series of webinars. Each webinar will turn a spotlight on different topical technology subjects; the first being on the Cloud. WFS has always been able to attract top-notch speakers and this webinar was no exception.

 

We first heard from UK-based William Fellows, founder of the leading technology analyst, The 451 Group, picking up some specific work he has recently done on the Cloud.

 

Next we had a great view on the Cloud as seen by Kristof De Spiegeleer, a Belgium-based serial entrepreneur working with Cloud infrastructure plays. Kristof spoke convincingly on the emergence of new Cloud Datacenters, shifting the CapEx costs of traditional datacenters to a pay-as-you-go OpEx cost.

 

IFS is a leading Nordic-based, global ERP company and a buyer of Cloud businesses. Fredrik Vom Hofe and Dan Matthews gave an insight in to IFS gradual evolution of their existing technology, platform and business models into the Cloud, providing their customers with more flexible payment and deployment models. I recently advised 360 Scheduling in its sale to IFS. 360s technology can be hosted in the Cloud.

 

Finally, my Corum colleague, Miro Parizek, based in Germany, brought us up to speed with Cloud-based M&A deals that are taking place.

 

There was tremendous feedback from the webinar attendees, with a very lively Q&A session. All in all, a great webinar, the first in what I would expect to a very popular series of WFS spotlights.