Cloud Computing Expo

There is now a thing called EuroCloud, for the moment a French-based SaaS and cloud community whose 70-odd members include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, France Telecom and SAP and whose 30 supporters include Amazon.

The object of the name is to share best practices and expand their business across the continent.

So far it's got representation in the UK, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Spain and Finland where there are essentially nascent local chapters and it has its sights set on expanding into Germany, Holland, Poland and Sweden.

The organization is hoping to attract the attention of governments that "will see in it an opportunity to invest in the cloud" and generally make people cloud-aware.

It also means to be the first European cloud ecosystem and a platform for exchange with other parts of the world.

It's aiming to develop the next generation of value-added applications and set up its headquarters in Brussels since the European Commission and the European Parliament don't yet recognize the cloud business "as the future of IT in Europe."

EuroCloud figures the cloud can help "stimulate the economic and technological environment." It wants to make the cloud trans-border and says "cloud computing implies application integration into an application-oriented ecosystem."

It wants to have 500 members by 2014.