Thanks to all of you that had a chance to attend our meeting last Friday. My fellow IBMer, Snehal Antani, presented us with a great overview of IBM WebSphere solutions for cloud computing. I would like to extend a thank you to him for his time.

For those that wanted to join but did not get the chance, we have a recording that you can listen to at your leisure:

www.websphereusergroup.org/websphereclou...

I hope to have another meeting soon. In that regard, if you have any suggestions for meeting topics, please post them in the forum so the group can see and comment on them. Remember, presentations do not have to be IBM-led, so if you have an idea you want to present, please let me know. 

I promised a meeting would come soon, and I am happy to announce that we have our first meeting of the new year lined up!

Mark your calendars for February 25th from 11 AM - 12 PM EST. Snehal Antani, a strategist and product manager for IBM Private Cloud initiatives, will talk to us about building private clouds using IBM WebSphere solutions. We will touch on the full spectrum of cloud needs, from deployment to run time management.

The meeting will be conducted as a webcast. The link for the meeting is here (be sure to register ahead of time): 

events.webdialogs.com/register.php?id=63...

The webcast will be enabled for audio streaming, so there is no need for dial-in numbers and passcodes. Just remember to register before the meeting to save time. Please join us for our first meeting of 2011!

Hello all! My name is Dustin Amrhein, and I am going to be the new moderator for the WebSphere Cloud Virtual User Group. In my day job, I am a technical evangelist/advocate for cloud computing technologies in WebSphere, so personally, this is a great fit. I hope to use some of the experiences and contacts of my day job to help make this a better group for all involved.

My goal is to ramp up the activity and community participation in this group. The fact that this is a virtual group should make it easier for everyone to attend meetings, contribute ideas, make contacts, and transfer knowledge. In that regard, expect to hear from me soon about our first meeting of 2011. My current target date is some time in early February, and I hope to send out a proposed agenda soon.

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for meeting topics, please let me know. Any and all cloud-related topics are welcome, and we will not limit the discussion to only IBM WebSphere or only IBM for that matter. My hope is that we can address the topics of most interest to the community -- whatever those may be.

Other than meeting topics, if you have any other feedback or suggestions, please let me know. You can send me an email using the GWC website, or you can reach me on Twitter via @damrhein. Thanks to all of you for joining this group, and I will be in touch soon!

Welcome to the WebSphere Cloud Virtual User Group.

My vision is to build this group into a thriving community of cloud enthusiasts and to provide a place where we can all share our perspectives not only about existing WebSphere cloud offerings, such as WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise - but also discuss what the future will bring in new cloud capabilities and delivery models. 

For those of you who have not seen last year's WebSphere in the Clouds campaign, I will point you to that content.... www.websphereusergroup.org/cms/websphere...

And keep on the lookout this summer for a follow-on WebSphere cloud campaign, where we will continue the dialog around new and innovative cloud technologies!

Thanks for being a part of this group and please contact me (see the contact group owner button) if you have any questions, suggestions for topics, etc.

Brandon Hurter
WebSphere Marketing Manager - Cloud and Virtualization