In the third keynote of day one of Parallels Summit 2013, EMC/VMware's Tod Nielsen discussed how the hosting industry is undergoing a drastic change
In the third keynote of day one of Parallels Summit 2013, Tod Nielsen, senior executive of Pivotal initiative at EMC/VMware discussed how the hosting industry is undergoing a drastic change and how this translates to a big opportunity for providers.
Over the last four years, cloud computing has leaped from a non-priority to the number one priority for CIOs, over other technologies like virtualization, mobility and business intelligence.
In the presentation, “Disruption and Opportunities in this New Era”, Nielsen brought up the changing nature of applications with an emergence of new, modern frameworks like Spring and Ruby on Rails, new application types such as Facebook and Tumblr, and data intensive applications like MySQL.
These applications and their increasing complexities is taking 4 to 6 months from idea to production, which leads to more tension between the developers of these apps and IT operations.
However, developers and IT have been working to alleviate this tension in recent years, cooperating with one another to make it easier for each side.
The IT triangle, as Nielsen calls it, is the relationship of people, process and technology in IT delivery. Trust must be created between the people and IT organizations, and this is the only way a solution can be effectively delivered.
Adding to this massive change is the proliferation of devices, including tablets, smartphones, and desktops. The explosive use of tablets have seen a rapid growth in just four years, beating out home computers and smartphones which took 8 to 12 years to see the same results.
Nielsen also looked at the transition from cloud builders to cloud brokers, where building a relationship between the builder and IT organization is crucial for success.
Providers have the opportunity to help customers who are confused about cloud solutions by offering greater support to them.
Another huge opportunity can be found in big data solutions, says Nielsen, explaining that the key is to packaging these solutions together to offer a one-stop solution.
Defining your ecosystem and business model and understanding what you really want to accomplish is an important aspect of cloud providers achieving success.
About Justin Lee
Justin Lee has been a staff analyst with theWHIR since 2004. He writes about a range of web hosting and IT-related issues facing the industry on the WHIR website, as well the print version of the WHIR magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Justin_theWHIR.
