Next week, on Oct 23rd in Tel Aviv we welcome the annual conference of IGT – The Israeli Association of Cloud Computing. Started in 2008, this is the 5th year that this international conference takes place in the vibrant city of Tel Aviv located alongside the Jaffa coastline. This year the conference will no longer discuss what is the cloud and how it disrupting the IT world. This year the conference holds two themes: Big Data and SaaS business.

In a discussion I had with Mr. Avner Algom, Founder and CEO of IGT, he noted:

““Every year we strive to bring the international industry leaders and, as our community grows, it just becomes more appealing and it’s easier to get them to come. Without a doubt, the question “What is Cloud?” is behind us. This year’s conference focus is on Big Data and SaaS. These are important issues for cloud companies and cloud business as these are strongly tied together in the cloud”” said Avner Algom, IGT CEO.

IGT stands for Israeli Grid Technologies. The term ”Grid” stood for the logical computer that is utilized in serving applications on-demand. It is great to see cloud revolution through the evolution of the IGT, which has changed its logo to include the term “Cloud”. IGT enjoyed 100% growth since last year, increasing its membership from 1,500 individual members to almost 3,000 members this year.
This year, the keynote speakers will be Amazon CTO Mr. Werner Vogles, discussing Big Data in the cloud. Rob Craft, Microsoft Cloud Platform Senior Director, together with representatives of Silicon Valley companies, like Sharon Barr VP from Couchbase, will lecture on NoSQL Database Technology trend.

“In the last two years we have seen exponential growth in new members and participants in our yearly conference. Today the cloud is everywhere. Since we started about nine years ago, our community changed from only entrepreneurs, startup guys and VCs to also include leading companies’ CIOs, and leading vendors such as AMAZON, IBM, HP, Microsoft, ALCATEL-LUCENT and government representatives.“ Algom added.

The conference includes several panels including a panel led by Dr. Yossy Vardi, the Israeli Startup Guru, and will include respected members such as Robert LoCascio, CEO at Liveperson, and SurveyMonkey CEO Mr. David Goldberg. The conference also includes practical workshop sessions including MS Azure, AWS Cloud (Runs by Carlos Conde, Sr. Manager Solutions Architect at Amazon AWS), Gigaspaces and Couchbase. Register for the conference here.
One of the next IGT conferences, on December 4th, will deal with Social Enterprise, media, and Community and will include leading international lecturers. Today the foundation enjoys the membership fees of its member companies while these companies can leverage IGT facilities to gain more presence in the market while together with the IGT preform conferences. In its respected list of members you can find the giant vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon and HP, all the way to leading startups such as Gigaspaces, WIX, Newvem, and Clarizen.

“We have been influencing this evolving market for the last nine years, but still feel young and have a lot of plans for the near future. We decided to invest more on knowledge generation by leveraging community and online content platforms.”

Besides the sharing of real practical knowledge, the IGT platform generates new marketing and business opportunities for its community members. This year IGT won the yearly meetup.com benchmark, and declared that its IGT meetup group is the most active technology group in the world, leading ahead of the Silicon Valley and NY parallel meet-up group.
As a real early adopter organization, the IGT team strives to extend its online and social presence and assets to provide new values to its dedicated community members.