451Research’s Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit began on an uplifting note for the more than 800 conference attendees gathered this week in Las Vegas, when analyst Rachel Chalmers proclaimed that she had “good news and better news. Chalmers proceeded to list numerous technical advances that supported an industry-wide move to cloud or hybrid arrangements. She also cited statistics developed by analysts from 451Research. More important, she listed a number of real-world examples of how cloud computing had already enabled advances that revolutionized company practices or scientific research, or both. The new practices she mentioned included a Coca-Cola bottling kiosk and Direct Diesel’s fuel delivery services. She also discussed at length the development of a Leukemia treatment and how it was further extended to include a population that had a gene anomaly that rendered the treatment ineffective. The latter anecdote was personal to Chalmers as she had a friend in the initial test cycle.

Chalmer’s hour-long presentation kicked off two days of presentations that covered all things cloud, featuring many of the company’s analysts and representatives from many of the industry’s largest hosting and cloud providers and vendors of DCIM, networking, and storage technologies.

Even the guest speaker, Mike Brown the astronomer who “killed” Pluto, stayed on theme. His hour-long discussion of the science and reasoning behind the decision to recategorize Pluto as a planetoid included segments about the advance of technology had changed—and continues to change astrology. He forecast that a new telescope in Chile would be able to map the night sky in five, which was a task that took him seven years until 2002. The big challenge reasoned 451 analyst Jim Grogan was how to handle the 20 Terabyte files the project would produce daily, given the widespread interest in the data and the limits of networking technology.

451Research’s Simon Carruthers had the final say of the conference, noting that the unparalleled positivity of the event reached even to the fundamentals of the companies in the industry.