Two Weeks in Vegas

A rant from the 23rd floor as I remove my lanyard and decompress:

Two weeks of recirculated casino air passing through two great cloud computing-themed conferences driven by fresh outlooks.  The contrast between stale casino smoke and fresh ideas was at times overpowering. IT is bold and strategic again, with less control and yet more options than ever. Welcome to consumerism on steroids.

I’m wrapping up the Gartner Data Center Conference week tonight, after last week at Amazon AWS re:INvent.  One conference focused on public cloud and the other on hybrid cloud; it was clear that IT is experiencing the beginning of the end of a kind of feudalism, one driven by vendors and various forms of hardware and channel lock-in. 

IMHO channels are going to become more service-driven than ever.  Buyers will have more choices than ever.

Agility will be the mantra of this new age; risk taking will be more commonplace.

Both conferences were monumental.  It was Amazon AWS’ first show and it was exquisitely managed; it was perhaps Gartner’s most visionary, most aggressive conference, at least in my memory.  Gartner has been hiring and bringing in some brilliant provocateurs, the kind of minds every company wants in this new age.

Beyond Gartner and Amazon and the lights of Las Vegas a cultural shift is underway in organizations of all sizes, public and private.  Fortune may indeed go to the bold. 

Amazon’s greatest risk may be in becoming a kind of Novell-like public cloud purist while the likes of VMware, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. keep expanding from their base in private clouds to the emergent hybrid cloud, along with OpenStack and a new generation of hungry startups.

Next week our stealth team plans to announce another big step, a kind of crossing of the hybrid cloud process barrier.  Stay tuned.