Cloud computing is changing the ground rules for startup companies – both in their infrastructure choices and in the bar for technology development prior to funding.

In a breakout session at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo, Lars Leckie - a Principal at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners - will walk through the venture capital perspective of the cloud computing market covering both consumer and enterprise usage. Leckie's session will cover the tools for cloud computing as well as the leverage that portfolio companies are achieving with cloud computing.

In the spirit of the event, Leckie notes that he will be presenting from slides served from Amazon Web Services.

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo (November 19-21, 2008) is a high-octane adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

Leckie is a Principal at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and has played a key role in the firm’s investments in Aria Systems (SaaS billing and customer management) and VKernel (Virtualization Infrastructure). While he spends less time programming now, he started his technical career coding and hacking computer games. He is the holder of several US patents.

He joins a star-studded lineup of speakers covering the hottest IT topic for years, with Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and a host of others all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated Cloud topics, will be addressed in San Jose by:

• Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Keynote)
• Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
• Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
• Peter Nickolov - Co-Founder & CTO, 3Tera
• Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
• Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
• Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
• Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
• Billy Marshall - Founder & CEO, rPath
• Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
• Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
• Patrick Harr, CEO - Nirvanix
• David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
• Dave Durkee - CEO, ENKI
• John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
• Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
• Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
• Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
• Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon
• Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group

The sessions are all listed here.