Day One of the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo is in full swing. First off, it took me nearly 30 minutes to find parking. For some reason the top level of the parking structure of the Santa Clara Convention Center was closed off. Not sure why. Then I walked through the San Jose Hyatt. At that point, I ran into the lines. The lines for registration were 50-100 people deep. And there was no special “press” registration. I waited 42 minutes to get my badge, and so did everybody else.

Was this an example of poor planning, or was there something deeper going on? Many people are touting “Cloud” as the next big thing. Larry Ellison not withstanding. The day 1 keynotes were over-full and there were overflow rooms for keynotes from Oracle, Amazon and Intel. There seems to be a lot on interest in this from both technical and non technical types, judging by the number of suits in the crowd. The always stand out. This is Northern California after all.

Could this be a sign that the Great Recession is over? Could be. All over Silicon Valley there are signs of hope. While SunOacle is laying off 3000-4000 this week, there are other companies are hiring. Companies are still having trouble hiring engineers, and VCs are doling out money to worthwhile companies.

That said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the afternoon, Oracle’s keynote was a standard Fusion pitch which mentioned cloud several times, all apparently irony-free. Intel’s cloud evangelist Jason Waxman give Intel’s vision of Cloud Computing, which seems to be very close to their virtualization story in years past.

It seems that while Cloud may be hot, it is not revolutionary, or even all that revolutionary. Or it could be I am jaundiced from having trouble parking and having to wait 42 minutes to register.