I've just arrive in Russia today. Above is the sign you see when you're ready to go through passport control. I like the "The Foreign States" phrase.

I'm here to present at a data center conference, one of the (if not the) leading tech conferences in Russia. The organizers expect arond 700 attendees. I'll be presenting the conference keynote address, as well as a half-day cloud computing tutorial -- both done with simultaneous translation. Looking forward to seeing how that goes!

I think it the conference will be very interesting. Russia has been described to me as 24 months behind the US in technology adoption. (In fact, as I recall, 24 months is generous; I think I've heard upwards of four years as the lag time). Consequently, people have told me that cloud computing is likely to be quite a ways off for Russia.

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment -- at least on the face of it. I believe that for many developing or emerging economies -- or economies adopting intensive computing a la the US -- with regard to cloud computing, their experience will mirror how developing nations have adopted telephony: they've adopted the latest technology -- wireless -- while bypassing the stage that developed nations went through -- laying vast amounts of copper wire to deliver traffic.

Just so, with regard to compute infrastructure: emerging economies will bypass the interim stage of building out company-specific infrastructure and will choose to leveraged centralized cloud computing environments.

Anyway, that's my working hypotheses, and I'm looking forward to validating (or disproving) it during my sessions and discussions over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, here are some additional photos:

This is a picture of a full-size ski jump located near the Moscow river, which is located in a section of the river devoted to sports and entertainment. Imagine having a ski jump in the downtown area of your city!

And here is a photo of Oleg, who works for the inviting organization (CIO Russia), who very kindly met me at the airport and brought me to the hotel I'm staying at (and where the conference is being held):

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