Last week, we hosted our second annual day-long infrastructure conference, Structure 09, in San Francisco. The sold-out event brought together some of the industry’s leading minds to discuss the issues surrounding web infrastructure. If Structure 08 was about the what and why of cloud computing, Structure 09 not only looked at the progress made over the last 12 months, but also focused on use cases and the methods of improving the fast-evolving cloud computing paradigm. The increased presence of the who’s who of the technology industry — IBM, HP, Microsoft, EMC and Akamai — is a sign that the cloud is no longer a mere curiosity. You can also read the complete wrap-up of the conference and its key takeaways over on our subscription-only service, GigaOM Pro.

And while Structure 09 was crammed with incredibly insightful moments, the participants made sure things never got too intense. Marc Benioff, the CEO of SalesForce.com, mocked the Zen-like utterings of his mentor, Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of Oracle. He also drew hearty laughs from the audience when he labeled Azure, Microsoft’s cloud effort, “AZune.” Zune is the much-vaunted digital music player Microsoft launched to compete with Apple’s iPod, though it has failed to unseat the iPod from its perch just yet.

I’m sure by now many of you have read about Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Engineering, chastising the equipment makers for failing to understand the needs of web-based companies. He also dismissed the recent performance gains claimed by chip makers Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices. There was some good-natured jousting between Google and Microsoft over web infrastructure management, too. Don’t forget to check out an amazing talk by Akamai CEO Paul Sagan on how the Net really works. (I’ve posted a link to all the blog posts and videos below the fold so you can check them out at your leisure.)

I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for making the event a success, from the generous support of our sponsors to the magnificent participants, attendees and all of you who watched from afar via the live-stream. Nearly 3,000 of you tuned in to watch some 60,000 minutes of conference-related video. Since then 5000 folks have watched a total of 250,000 of Structure related video. To all of you — thanks and see you in 2010.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Photos by James Duncan-Davidson.

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