There is no question that we're on the cusp of rapid IT evolution. Ten years ago, a small subset of IT managers and system administrators defined and drove infrastructure and services with a finite set of management tools for everyone's use. In the emerging cloud world, the control of the data center has become segregated into individual hardware components (compute, network, storage) and become more available to the masses.

Today developers are building and running cloud services and next generation applications.  As users, we are also composing our own cloud services to get our job done and combining all the various things we can consume in the cloud. That means the number of users and developers that touch IT systems and services has grown exponentially, which is why automation, programmability, and light weight development environments have become critical in the IT landscape.  By definition, the consumption of these varying services have also driven the requirements for fast, hybrid IT and given the opportunity to companies like Amazon Web Services to capitalize on the users.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!

But we are anticipating a much bigger wave in IT -one that we all have to be prepared for -which is digitization. With all things of value connecting to the network, we are walking around with super computers in our pockets and in our cars and homes.  These "things" (e.g. FitBit, Nest, and the Telsa smart traffic mapping application) are the new "users" that are consuming services and data from our surroundings and using these services to get their jobs done.  This is another order of magnitude greater than the system administrators who drove the IT revolution and the users like us who drove the initial cloud revolution. We need to find a way to push the intelligence and services all the way out to the edge and tie this uber-distributed compute fabric together to support the "things" while giving the developers and users the automated, secure platform, intelligence, and analytics that they need.

Hyper-distributed Application Environment

This means in the current cloud economy, enterprises will need a bimodal IT model to take advantage of this uber-distributed compute fabric -one that supports their existing legacy applications AND one that supports hyperscale applications (those cloud-native applications built for mobile, gaming, ecommerce, etc.).  We need to allow enterprise to deploy those new applications in hundreds of clouds and not just on their own private cloud. Enabling this kind of distributed application environment will require an agile, FAST IT development strategy combined with the right cloud platform to manage it. In addition, this cloud platform needs to be hybrid as well to allow full workload mobility across any cloud, from any vendor in a way that guarantees visibility, security, compliance and full open standards.

We believe that Intercloud, the global network of connected clouds that we're building with our partners, is the right hybrid cloud platform to help users take advantage of digitization and IoE in the near future. Our partners are going to play a major role in making this a reality for their customers.

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