I'm in Silicon Valley today, attending, panel moderating, twittering, and blogging from the one-day Cloud Summit Executive (produced by InformationWeek's parent TechWeb) and the event was kicked off with a brief introduction by Sand Hill Group co-founder MR Rangaswami.Rangaswami opened by talking about how fitting the Computer History Museum is as the site for this, the first Cloud Summit Executive conference, and then set the themes for the rest of the event:

• Defining what is and what isn't cloud
• What are the business models of the cloud (are they the same as SaaS or is there more to it)?
• What are the value propositions of the cloud?
• How does the venture community regard cloud?
• How does Wall Street view the cloud?
• What do entrepreneurs thing of the cloud?
• Will it get adopted and how fast?

There are some all-conference sessions in the morning including a presentation by HP's senior vice president of software Tom Hogan (I'll post a separate blog on his discussion next) and Trend Micro VP John Maddison, who talked about how, given the increasing tide of zero-day and zero-hour attacks, the current model of delivering periodic updates to PCs is simply unsustainable. He said that even by conservative estimates, by the year 2015, it will take 25 MB of anti-malware updates per hour (yes, per hour) just to keep up.

The day breaks into three tracks once the all-conference sessions are over (you can see the full schedule here).

Stay tuned here for more blogs from the conference today and also keep an eye on my Twitter feed as well as the Twitter search hashtag #cloudsummit for more.