Anwar Abbas, CIO of the Motion Picture Industry Health & Pension Plans, has been tasked with assembling a cloud computing roundtable at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. As it turns out, cloud experts are hard to find.I promised Anwar that I would help him find speakers. My guess is that many IT execs are in the same boat -- needing to know more about cloud services, but not sure where to turn. It hasn't helped, Anwar says, that some of the major cloud vendors haven't returned calls. My suggestion to cloud service providers is to get that problem fixed fast because if Anwar can't get through to the right person, you can be sure that others are running into dead ends, too.

Here are the details on the two-hour roundtable. Date is June 2, 2009. It's sponsored by UCLA Anderson IS Associates, a partnership between the school and the business community, and it will be held on the UCLA campus. Topic: 'Is cloud computing ready for prime time?'

If you or someone you know is an IT professional with experience working with cloud services and you're willing to participate, drop me an e-mail and I'll forward it. Meantime, I'll be digging into my contacts list to see if I can connect Anwar with peers who might be a good fit.

Ironically, one CIO I know who would have been ideal for a cloud roundtable has just changed jobs, and it's unclear if he will be as accessible as he was before. His new employer? Amazon Web Services.

To contact me: jpfoley@techweb.com