Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, Yousef Khalidi will participate in the panel, “The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)” this Thursday, June 24, 2010, 3:40 pm at Structure 2010, GigaOM’s premier thought leadership conference, which will be held June 23-24, 2010 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. If you can’t make it to Structure 2010, the session will be available via livestream and a recap of the panel will be posted to this blog on Friday, June 25, 2010.

This should be an interesting conversation with an eclectic group of panelists who are set to debate the future of PaaS and which direction the market may ultimately take.  Other participants in the panel, moderated by GigaOM Pro’s Infrastructure Curator, Derrick Harris, include Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace Hosting, Mike Piech, senior director of product marketing at Oracle, Byron Sebastian, ceo of Heroku, and Tien Tzuo, founder & ceo of Zuora.

If you do plan to attend Structure, you may also want to check out Yousef’s other session, “Why the cloud? Why the Windows Azure platform?” on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 3:15 pm.   This session will focus on how cloud computing enables developers to play a key role in shifting the IT dynamic and driving new revenue through innovative application development.  Yousef will also drive a discussion around how Microsoft is addressing this space via the Windows Azure platform and how customers should be planning for the cloud, both today and for the future.