As we head into Thanksgiving Weekend, we bring a brief round-up of some of the many follow-up comments we have been receiving since November's 9th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA. Thanks for your thanks, and see you on the other side...when the countdown steadily begins to New York's mega-event: 10th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York (June 11-14).

Shannon Cruey - Senior Solutions Architect at Cloud Sidekick

Cloud Expo last week was simply an awesome experience for Cato and the whole Cloud Sidekick team. We gave away a thousand wonderfully obnoxious bright orange “Be The Hero” t-shirts, and left many people disappointed when we ran out. We hope you’ll proudly wear yours! CloudExpo was basically the coming out party for Cloud Sidekick and Cato, and we had fantastic results. The amount of energy and excitement was palpable, and we came away with tons of ideas and suggestions, some of which we will be implementing immediately.

Rich Wolski (CTO, Eucalyptus Systems)

Thanks for a great show. As always, it is was both entertaining and informative.

Natalie Burch, Marketing Coordinator, SoftLayer Systems

All in all, Cloud Expo Silicon Valley was an exemplary tradeshow for SoftLayer … Three fantastic speakers in two days driving traffic to our booth where we could share how SoftLayer has built our cloud and how our approach is part of a bigger effort to drive innovation in the world of hosting.

Steve Levine, TheCloudist.com

We witnessed a proliferation of several mature cloud management offerings from some well-known and pedigreed providers. What each have in common is an ‘A-List’ team of founding cloud leaders and well defined services designed to corner a juicy segment of the market.

Wayne Greene - Business & Product Architect of Cisco's Intelligent Automation Strategy, Cloud, DC & App Automation

Cloud Expo was indeed a very interesting juxtaposition of people espousing the value of cloud and how their stuff is really cloudy. You have a group of presenters and expo floor booths talking about their open API and how that is the future of cloud. Then you have the other camp that tells us how their special mix of functions is so much better than that. All of this is a very interesting dialog.