Does being a developer on someone else's platform mean being hosted on their infrastructure? Moderator Tim O'Reilly opens the group discussion with this timely question. The candid perspectives exchanged among the leaders from VMWare, Inc., salesforce.com, and Amazon Web Services provide ample food for thought; and possibly grist for strategic planning.

The participants discuss in plain language the affect of cloud infrastructure on IT technology, developer relationships, and new business models. Cloud computing introduces issues around points of control. Who will end up being the custodian of our information? What are the disruptive and innovative things happening in the cloud? These are all explored with real-world examples.

As more operating system installations are resident outside the local machine, are we moving toward an "Internet operating system?" What does the "global operating system infrastructure" look like? Is it something that you take for granted, with the exception of local apps? And who is going to control this global infrastructure?

What about proprietary lock-in versus portability issues in the cloud era? Are we going back to the mainframe world of the 1960s, where you needed to be on the host infrastructure in order to develop for it? Or is the cloud becoming the "new hardware?" How do you achieve portability of apps and data across different hardware? Listeners from large enterprises as well as small businesses will find this discussion relevant.