Christiansen: A hybrid world is the true reality. Just the
complexity of the enterprise, no matter what industry you
are in, has caused these application centers of gravity. The
latency issues between applications that could be moved to
cloud or not, or impacted by where the data resides, these
have created huge gravity issues, so they are unable to take
advantage of the frameworks that the public clouds
provide.
So the reality is that the public cloud is going to have to
come down into the four walls of the enterprise. As a result
of that, we are seeing an explosion of the common abstrac-
tion — there is going to be some open source framework for
all clouds to communicate and to talk and behave alike.
Over the past decade, the on-premises and OpenStack
world has been decommissioning the whole legacy technol-
ogy stack, moving it off to the side as a priority, as they seek
to adopt cloud. The reality now is that we have regional,
government and data privacy issues; we have got all sorts
of things that are pulling it all back internally again.
Out of all this chaos is going to rise the phoenix of some
sort of common framework. There has to be. There is no
other way out of this. We are already seeing organizations
such as Paolo’s at Mastercard develop a mandate to take
the agile step forward.
They want somebody to provide the ability to gain more
business value versus the technology, to manage and keep
track of infrastructure, and to future-proof that platform.
But at the same time, they want a technology position
where they can use common frameworks, common lan-
guages, things that give interoperability across multiple
platforms. That’s where you are seeing a huge amount of
investment.
I don’t know if you recently saw that HashiCorp got $100
million in additional funding, and they have a valuation of
almost $2 billion. This is a company that specializes in sit-
ting in that space. And we are going to see more of that.
And as folks like Mastercard drive the requirements, the “all
in on one public cloud” mentality is going to quickly evapo-
rate. These platforms absolutely have to learn how to play
together and get along with on-premises, as well as
between themselves.
Gardner: Paolo, any last thoughts about how we get cloud
providers to be team players rather than walking around
with sharp elbows?
Pelizzoli: I think it’s actually going to end up that a lot more
of the technology that’s being allowed to run on these cloud
platforms is going to take care of it.
I mentioned Kubernetes and Docker earlier, and there are
others out there. The fact that they can isolate themselves
from the cloud provider itself is where it will neutralize some
of the sharp elbowing that goes on.
Now, there are going to be features that keep coming up
that I think companies like ours will take a look at and start
putting workloads in where the latest cutting-edge feature
gives us a competitive advantage, and then wait for other
cloud providers to go through and catch up. And when they
do, we can then deploy out on those. But those will be very
conscious decisions.
I don’t think that there is a “one cloud fits all,” but where
appropriate, we will go through and be absolutely multi-
cloud. Where there is defining difference, we will go through
and select the cloud provider that best suits in that area to
cover that specific capability.
This is a condensed version of the full interview, which orig-
inally appeared on the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Cus-
tomer podcast series.
Listen to the full podcast at
www.cloudtp.com/doppler/podcasts
WINTER 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 19