Cloud World Forum London wasn’t what I expected this year. But, there’s good & bad*. The good: ten niche vendors, who might have been overshadowed by marketing prowess of big league complete-suite cloud vendors, had an opportunity to shine.

(* The bad: many other inspiring cloud innovators weren’t there. Nor were the crowds. As there were serious business professionals who showcased their stories and offered insightful advice for IT implementers, it was worthwhile attending in the end.)
When pitched versus Salesforce World Tour London 2015, or even London Tech Week, this international IT conference held in London each year, the event was not that inspirational for professional who aren’t focused on regulatory compliance, and other cloud IT matters of that nature.

In contrast, Salesforce has a unique ability to inspire IT professionals, executives and employees alike to create a greater company, and enabling this greatness through its cloud platform. Salesforce seems to have the perfect blend of product delivery and innovation, a good sense of marketing dazzle, enabling advice, and practical substance. And it showcases that exceedingly well in its annual events around the world.)

This year, 24-25 June, Cloud World Forum was held in the smaller section of the Olympia Grand, in London. While self-acclaimed to be EMEA’s leading Cloud event with the industry’s most comprehensive agenda of all things Cloud, I considered that the event was a relatively small and lacked a tat of lustre. Many inspiring cloud innovators or major world league tech vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle weren’t present on the floor. Only Heroku, Salesforce most technical component, was presented. As a result, it wasn’t as well attended as hoped. But it wasn’t all bad though.)

Cloud World Forum Presentations

Here are some good bits: As the number of podiums had reduced drastically from last year, and the ones that remained were the draw cards of the event. I picked up a wonderful cloud success story by Denise Parkinson, Entertainment Director Global and UK for the Telegraph Media Group. Others might have enjoyed hearing John Finch, CIO of the UK’s central bank, explain why he ruled out any role for public cloud in the Bank’s core IT systems and infrastructure.

More good news. Beyond the speakers forums, I spotted at least 10 interesting cloud vendors at Cloud World Forum London to note.

Interesting Companies, Technologies and Cloud Markets to note

1. Cloudsense – Its Quote-to-Cash software (native to Salesforce) allows you to sell fast, easily and accurately across any channel to transform your sales effectiveness through increased sales order values, reduced order errors and improved sales process automation. Very professional organization that sales marketing directors will want to work. Their enhanced User Interface gives you insight into things like optimal product bundling and other metrics that are of real business use to sales and marketing. Its industry vertical orientation makes them pay special attention to the needs of their clients in utilities, financial services, media, and telecom. Last but not least, it’s scalable and grows with you.

2. Huddle – This is a secure and efficient document-centered collaboration system that works with Salesforce CRM ao. Used by over 100,000 businesses around the world, and maybe you should be one of them. Get on their bus.

3. Ormuco – With Canadian roots, now firmly growing in the UK, this company provide off-premises private secure clouds, seamlessly connected to a scalable, on demand public cloud. Running on a fully redundant infrastructure, these hybrid cloud solutions are backed by industry leading hardware providers. Their cloud is based on open-stack and runs on HP Helion. Ideal customers are ISVs, service providers and enterprise with 500+ users.

4. Twilio – Twilio connects to Pardot, Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation platform for immediate phone follow-up of leads. However, Twilio does more than this. Its business is 50/50 phone and SMS with video being the runner up. “Enabling phones, VoIP, and messaging to be embedded into web, desktop, and mobile software.” is their slogan. Twilio has a pay-for–what-you-use – pricing model.  You might like your IT department to talk them.

5. Cambridge Imaging Systems –  Enterprise video platform solution designed to manage and publish media in a secure branded website.  Since the growing popularity of web-based video communication, this is a company to know more about.

6. Avantgate – This cloud vendor powers modern digital commerce, finally solving the complexity of online commerce, subscription billing, and global payments for Software, SaaS and Online Services companies.

7. New Relic – When your brand and customer experience depend on the performance of modern software, this company provides insight into your overall environment. Its comprehensive SaaS-based solution provides one powerful interface for web and native mobile applications and consolidates the performance monitoring data for any chosen technology in your environment.

8. Creative Consultants – Not what you think. These are seriously IT specialists  who nonetheless creatively provide full end-to-end, subject matter experts including pre-sales plan and design, deployment and support. They use Cisco UCS as their platform and focus on hybrid cloud, helping you to balance the public cloud for cheap data and the private cloud for performance-critical data to optimize your IT business solution. I am thinking retailers who face seasonality and need to scale back and forth between the private/public cloud fast might enjoy working with them.

9. MongoDB  –  The next-generation database that helps businesses transform their industries by harnessing the power of data.

Last but not least…

10.  Hipsters, Hackers and Hustlers – 5000+ member community of collaborating developers, entrepreneurs and investors to inspire, educate and support tech startups. It’s  UK’s largest community of tech startups. Yes you can join.