Adaptivity CEO Tony Bishop took his audience through a tour of what the self-described geek thinks is of critical importance when looking at workloads and cloud computing, in general session at the 4th International Cloud Computing Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley.

"Who are the users? What do they want? How much are they willing to pay for it?," he asked rhetorically. "These are questions you need to address early, this is information you must collect before you even start thinking about the compute. Are you capturing this information (early) in the process?" he asked during his presentation.

Key areas to address are: low latency, complex transactions, information integration, ubiquitous users, and numerical processing, he noted.

"Measuring, metering, and monitoring the work, and understand its physics so that you can understand where to move it and how" are mission-critical aspects of analyzing cloud computing processes, he noted.

Furthermore, "if you don't virtualize the data tier (you will be unsuccessful)," he said. "You have to be able to pick up workloads and move them around. You will not have the elasticity you need and you will not be able to fulfill the needs of the business," he noted.

The event continues through Wednesday, November 4 and features an exhibition as well as 110+ speakers in a multi-track program.