Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you look around from your vantage point, what’s happening? What are the trends that you are picking up or trends that you’re anticipating right now?

Scott McIsaac: In today’s world, we see a lot of business being pushed in the direction of the cloud. Businesses are realizing that they can focus on what they do best versus having to deal with a lot of infrastructure. Again to Sean’s point earlier, if they have compliance needs, they’re still looking to the cloud, but they’re looking for a provider that can provide that level of service.

Sean Donaldson: Five years ago, it was really about convincing people why they have to move to the cloud. Fast forward to today, everyone has a CIO or an IT Director who pretty much said, “In five years, we’re going to be out of the hosting business and we’re going to be outsourcing this to a cloud or a SaaS model.” That’s what we see a lot today. Obviously, as far as where the industry is going, Big Data is a big part of that. That’s the next hype cycle right now.

Sramana Mitra: Big Data is something I don’t want to get into because we have a whole coverage of Thought Leaders in Big Data. I’m more curious about, given your role as a private cloud hosting provider, when you deal with a type of customer that is working on a specific problem closely, you get exposed to customer requirements and things that customers are asking for but are not available in the market right now. I’m looking for that kind of trend and opportunity analysis.

Scott McIsaac: As they look towards the cloud, they’re looking at ways they can leverage the cloud. We see a lot of people today in the market that are just getting to get their feet with open stack. Again, it doesn’t really seem like that’s going to be the direction in the next two years where people are willing to put their production workloads on. I think we see people testing the waters in that area.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything that you’ve seen that customers are asking for that you haven’t seen a solution to?

Scott McIsaac: In our market segment, we solve a lot of the problems for our clients, because they don’t want to focus on having to manage infrastructure or deal with the application. To Sean’s point, I know you don’t want to discuss Big Data but that’s something that we run into a lot. Big Data and what can customers do to make business decisions with that is a huge topic right now that we see.

Sramana Mitra: It’s been nice talking to you. Thank you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson
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