I will be at three Gartner conferences during the remainder of this year.

I will be at Symposium ITxpo Orlando. My main session here will be The Great Debate: Shared-Hardware vs. Shared-Everything Multitenancy, or Amazon’s Apples vs. Force.com’s Oranges. (Or for those of you who heard Larry Ellison’s OpenWorld keynote, Oracle ExaLogic vs. Salesforce.com…) The debate will be moderated by my colleague Ray Valdes, I’ll be taking the shared-hardware side while my colleague Eric Knipp takes the shared-everything side. I’m also likely to be running some end-user roundtables, but mostly, I’ll be available to take questions in 1-on-1 sessions.

If you go to Symposium, I highly encourage you to attend a session by one of my colleagues, Neil MacDonald. It’s called Why Cloud-Based Computing Will Be More Secure Than What You Have Today, and it’s what we call a “maverick pitch”, which means that it’s follows an idea that’s not a common consensus opinion at Gartner. But it’s also the foundation of some really, really interesting work that we’re doing on the future of the cloud, and it follows an incredibly important tenet that we’re talking about a lot: that control is not a substitute for trust, and the historical model that enterprises have had of equating the two is fundamentally broken.

I will be at the Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit (ala, our Web and Cloud conference) in November. I’m giving two presentations there. The first will be Controlling the Cloud: How to Leverage Cloud Computing Without Losing Control of Your IT Processes. The second is Infrastructure as a Service: Providing Data Center Services in the Cloud. I’ll also be running an end-user roundtable on building private clouds, and be available to take 1-on-1 questions.

Finally, I will be at the Data Center Conference in December. I’m giving two presentations there. The first will be Is Amazon, Not VMware, the Future of Your Data Center? The second is Getting Real With Cloud Infrastructure Services. I’ll also be in one of our “town hall” meetings on cloud, running an end-user roundtable on cloud IaaS, and be available to take 1-on-1 questions.

I will be at VMworld Europe this week.

I am speaking on Wednesday, October 13th, at 10:30 am, giving a short tutorial on outsourcing cloud infrastructure as a service. This is an NTT Communications-sponsored session. I also expect to be available to answer questions at NTT’s booth during that day.

During the rest of the conference I’m available for one-on-one meetings, regardless of whether or not you’re a Gartner client. Please send me email if you’d like to meet.

(In case you’re wondering how vendor-neutrality works when I do a vendor-sponsored day like this: NTT has no control over my presentation content whatsoever, nor anything that I say in general. It’s a risk for the vendor, in that they don’t know what I’m going to say exactly, and that what I have to say might not be entirely consonant with their strategy. But it’s part of Gartner’s policy when we speak at an external event like this, which means that you, as an attendee, don’t have to wonder about whether I’d have said something else under different circumstances.)