By Michelle Swan
- Although there was some theoretical debate in the panel, the bulk of the conversation focused on the practicalities of moving to the cloud. They discussed security, availability, licensing and such, but more importantly how they were getting beyond those issues with pilots, proof of concepts, partnering with cloud experts, or just making the leap.
- This panel (finally) got beyond the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) focus that dominated much of the show’s agenda and talked about what the business was actually able to do on top of cloud environments. There was even consensus at the end that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) was where they were expecting major advances.
- The benefits they pointed to weren’t solely focused on lowering costs. Sure that was why many started on the path, but it was business agility and speed to market that ultimately prevailed. This is something Appirio hears from our own customers quite a bit.
- Here were a group of senior IT professionals who were very candid about how cloud computing has changed their job, and the legacy thinking they still struggle with in their teams. It was enlightening to hear (and I quote) “gone are the days of a CIO coming in and building a new data center. Moving forward, we’ll put a router in the corner, give everyone money for a laptop and rent everything else as a service.” This fits well with Gartner’s prediction earlier this year that 20% of all companies will own no IT assets by 2012, but nice to hear from large enterprises as well.