Why does the Laurel Group author publications like these?

The Laurel Group provides guidance and counsel to companies across the nation with senior leadership needs. As advisors and builders of these companies, not only are we experts in talent evaluation and acquisition, we provide guidance around emerging trends that may change the landscape of a given market.

As the pace of change accelerates, the number of clients recently asking us about "cloud services/computing" has been rapidly increasing. However, with all the books, blogs, articles, wikis and other commentary addressing the trend, it has become difficult to discern myth from truth. Our approach has always been to go direct to the source. We felt that the best way to address the questions and inquiries surrounding this market was to bring together a world-class group of thought leaders who are driving this market shift and get their candid input on the meaning of "Cloud Services/Computing", and the challenges and opportunities ahead. What you will read in the following pages are their thoughts regarding the following questions:

1. From your perch, what is the meaning of "Cloud Services/Computing", and what are the most important benefits emerging from cloud services that will transform the economics of IT?
2. How will concerns around data governance, availability and security impact the adoption of cloud services?
3. How are cloud services testing traditional thinking around "control of data" and "guarantees of safety"; to include ownership, access and rights that supersede failure of the provider? Ultimately, who should be accountable; vendor or service provider?
4. What are the SME (Small-Medium Enterprise) benefits that would work well in a departmental setting? What are the key adoption barriers?
5. Is dominance among a few industry giants a good thing for cloud computing? What are the implications for the rest?

About the Laurel Group

We are retained executive search consultants who specialize in working with high growth technology companies, both private and public. We are a firm that strongly believes we must entrench ourselves in the markets we serve in order to provide the best service possible to our clients. As advocates of change and messengers of emerging technology paradigms, we offer these publications as a form of consumable intelligence we hope is both relevant and useful to your business.

We hope you enjoy the read.

Message to our participants:

We would like to sincerely thank each of you for your involvement in this publication, your efforts and candid thoughts are greatly appreciated. We wish you, and your business, continued success in 2009.

All the best,

Steve O'Deegan (editor)
Managing Partner, Laurel Group
steve@laurel-group.com