Last night at Mayfield on Sand Hill Road Dealmaker Media hosted “Customers in the Cloud: Secrets to Driving Sales in Today’s Cloud Economy.”

We packed 57 folks sardine-style into Mayfield’s biggest boardroom, which led to lively conversations, a lot of chair shuffling, and some comradely ribbing among friendly competitors like Rackspace and Media Temple.

Discussion was expertly led by Mayfield’s own Managing Director Navin Chaddha – the surprise superstar of the night who engaged the audience with a moderating style that earned him the nickname “The Conan O’Brien of Sand Hill Road.”

Hot topics included:

• Sizes of cloud deployment deals – even big companies like Cisco often start with small ‘test’ contracts
• Losing ‘touch’ – what happens when CIOs and IT teams can’t put hands on a server directly?
• SaaS on it’s way out – location as a service (LaaS), platform as a service (Paas) and other emerging models
• Branded clouds for internal use – is there a future in buying your ‘own’ cloud?
• How to evaluate cloud spend – it’s not just software vs. hardware anymore
• What kinds of companies will be pushed out of the market by virtualization?

Follow us @dealmakermedia to read a transcript of live tweets from the event. For those of you monitoring the business conversations on Twitter.com, the hashtag used to track this tweetstream was #dmmcloud.

Thanks again to our excellent speakers (several of whom set up meetings on the spot with cloud startups like Y Combinator alum Cloud Kick in the crowd):

Clarence So, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Salesforce.com

David Berman, Former Co-President of WebEx, current Head of Field Operations, Barracuda Networks

Lew Moorman, President, Cloud Division and Chief Strategy Officer, Rackspace Hosting

Josh Fraser, VP Sales & Business Development, Rightscale

Steve Phillpott, CIO, Amylin Pharmaceuticals

Steve Phillpott, CIO: Describing Amylin's Evolving Cloud IT Strategy

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• 8x year; food, fun, good conversations
• 6:30-8:30pm; ~35 attendees (SS events sell out quick)
• interactive, roundtable discussions (lively Q&A) led by industry vets who talk trends and share best practice growth strategies, VC funding advice, and are interested in alliance building

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