With 9th Cloud Expo at Silicon Valley's Santa Clara Convention Center now finished, Cloud Computing Journal asked a variety of industry stakeholders what their Top Three takeaways were from the event, now that the many thousands of delegates are back at their desks and their companies, leveraging the knowledge and the insights that they gained through the extensive technical/strategic program and the huge number of booths on the Expo floor.

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Here are the Top Three according to Dave Roberts - Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at ServiceMesh.

Takeaway #1: Private PaaS is the NEXT HOT THING

While IaaS provides a great, generic substrate on which to create applications, most enterprises are going to up-level their developers to a PaaS platform to promote increased efficiency, faster delivery times, and more reliable applications. Much of the focus so-far has been on Public PaaS. Public PaaS is great, but it requires commitment to a service provider with little capacity to migrate if things go south. Private PaaS provides a standard, high-level environment that is portable to almost any IaaS cloud.

Takeaway #2: 2012 will be the Year of Production

2011 saw a lot of PoC activity and "playing with clouds." Trial projects were committed and executed. Those are now bearing fruit, people are talking about the results, and everyone is increasingly saying the P-word. Expect to see a large number of applications lifted, shifted, retargeted, and written cloud-native in 2012.

Takeaway #3: Cloud Policy and Governance is the missing link

Much of the past couple years has been focused on building clouds. We have worked through most of those issues. The question now is how are people going to use clouds. Enterprises are rapidly coming to the conclusion that without a strong policy and governance solution, self-service IT either can't happen or will be so restrictive as to be useless. Expect to see #cloudgovernance trending on Twitter through 2012.