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.