• No one uses them (this is bad)
• Everyone uses them (this is also bad, but for different reasons)

The former problem is one of cultural change and outside of the gambit of a technical functionality discussion. The latter problem however is one where product vendors can directly help to find solutions. And need to if their tools are going to see widespread adoption.

Which is why its very interesting to see the latest version of Tibbr, the enterprise social streaming product from Tibco, being released. In this version Tibco has focused on three of the most important barriers to the efficacy of social streaming: integrations, discovery of content and accessibility.

The last leg of the three is the easiest to talk about – Tibbr is now available on all the platforms of note (iOS and Android) as well as the platform that most people write off, but lots of enterprises still use, BlackBerry. Now with that piece of less-than-exciting news out of the way, it’s time to get on to the interesting stuff.

In this release, Tibco has focused hard on surfacing the right content by building in lots of behind the scenes tools to make the correct content more discoverable. The company has worked on algorithms which take into account the content a particular user tends to look at, their social graph and other factors, to surface content within what they’re calling a “Discovery Panel” – kind of a trending and contextual content window within the application.

Next up is something that is really compelling, and what is indeed the future of enterprise applications. Tibco has opened up the Tibbr APIs and allowed people to build integrations with other enterprise applications of record. In this way users can both surface enterprise information within the social application but, more importantly, can take actions within the Tibbr application itself. Say you have an expense item from oracle – that can be surfaced and approved within Tibbr. Within the new application, Tibbr has an interesting way of enabling this. Users see the message (ie, “your Oracle system is presenting a new expense to approve”). When clicking on the particular message, the panel is flipped over and an action window is shown – users can take the action they need (approve, decline etc) and this is changed within the original system of record.

I’ve long opined that the real promise of cloud, or SaaS and of enterprise APIs is the ability to integrate applications – not just in a traditional EDI sense of the word, but in a truly contextual manner. This latest version of Tibbr delivers on that vision – I’m looking forward to seeing stories of smart integrations people are building on top of the platform.

Like many similar solutions, TiimFocus was borne out of the founder’s frustration running their own business. Co-founder Kevin Withnell began developing the product two years ago, and initially created the product for internal purposes for his 12 person development company. His company used the systems that most small shops use – and tried to manage their workflow via emails and physical meetings – seeing the ball dropped on a project once to often made Withnell think about better ways of doing things. Seeing the results of what he’d created inspired Withnell to move to developing the product commercially and now, two years and $500k in angel funding later, the company is getting ready to start generating some buzz.

Their initial way to do that is by being critical of arguably the highest profile company in the space. Asana, which was started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is firmly in TiimFocus’ crosshairs. Says Withnell:

(Asana’s) greatest strength (an easy-to- use product), is also it’s largest weakness (minimal functionality). We outgrew Asana within a month. TiimFocus was built to be the world’s most complete collaborative task system. Companies will not be able to outgrow TiimFocus

TiimFocus’ main angle of differentiation from most of the other tools, is the depth of its offering. In particular TiimFocus is particularly strong on mapping the individual tasks to resource planning and organizational workflow. The workflow functionality allows individuals to determine and push tasks that have been sitting idle and are causing bottlenecks while application metrics help workers focus on completing the right tasks at hand.

Specific functionality the company wants to call out includes:

• Tasks – Tasks can have as little or as much information as your business needs with the ability to add as many fields as you need
• Workflows – Workflows enable users to start with a standard workflow and progress to a fully customized workflow that matches their exact needs. For example, with Workflows driving tasks users can ensure all tasks to go via a Quality Assurance, Marketing or Accounting approval step
• Metrics – Metrics give users a visual snapshot of the status of all their tasks. Metrics also help identify where the bottlenecks are in the Workflow
• Searching – Search allows users to show just the tasks they need to work on right now or to get the details on all tasks using custom search filters
• Cross Platform – Cross browser and compatible with all PCs (Windows and Mac), as well as Tablets and Smartphones including Apple, Android and Windows devices
• Customizable – TiimFocus is fully customizable to the needs of the business. From Workflows through to Task fields and Reporting, it is all completely flexible
• Sharing – Invite anyone to see or interact with Workflows. TiimFocus is built around collaboration. By sharing workflows and inviting others users can focus everyone’s energy on the common goal

Interestingly TiimFocus is scheduled to release a public API later in the year which will mean organizations can embed project management and planning functionality within their third party applications.

TiimFocus is free for the first 10 users, and charges a monthly subscriptions for subsequent users. The company also provides customized enterprise solutions.

For Intel, this comes as something of a Hail Mary pass. As hardware becomes more and more commoditized and undifferentiated, vendors like Intel who have an overwhelming majority of their revenue deriving from hardware sales, bneed to work out how to differentiate what they do. Their situation is not unlike that of networking vendors like Cisco and Juniper who are being disrupted by the dual forces of direct sourcing from Asian OEM manufactures, and software taking over much of their core value proposition.

The future then for both the networking companies and the server/chip companies, lies in building a strong value proposition on top of what they do at a core level. For Intel, I’ve long thought that this means delivering the “software defined server”. Intel has already started down this path having made a couple of unusual, but still interesting acquisitions in the form of McAfee and Sarvega. Anyway – back to what this deal means for Intel – Taking base level silicon but allowing organizations to tailor the specific attributes of infrastructure using software. Much of both the visibility around what needs to happen on this “control plane” level, along with empowering the tailoring, happens via a host of different APIs. This is where Mashery comes in, as a platform it powers and manages the entire API interchange. I’d envisage another acquisition or two would help Intel really build out this “data center control plane” story – perhaps a RightScale, an enstratius or an Opscode. In doing so Intel would be able to maintain its relevance and strength in the data center, albeit moving from hardware to software enabled hardware.

Everyone accepts that software is eating the world. That’s a very uncomfortable statement for hardware vendors – but by taking their “dumb hardware” and smarting it up with software – companies like Intel shore up their existing revenues but more importantly build a layer of protection that makes it harder for them to be disrupted by low cost alternatives. As Mike Maney, a PR pro who watches this space closely said to me:

[this move is] further proof that APIs have moved beyond their app roots and are getting deeper into the network and the enterprise.

I couldn’t agree more – APIs are the lifeblood of a software defined future – we’ll be seeing much more about them in the years ahead.

As would be expected of an HP product – it is sold through service providers who often bundle a number of different services together to provide a tailored solution for customers. And this is where it gets interesting, one would have thought that, given their go-to-market involves service providers, HP would have provided everything those SPs need in order to sell a product – well the OneNet launch would suggest not. OneNet is offering three “as-a-service” modules that offer service providers:

• Data visualization through dashboards. Past usage and growth are tracked and future usage is forecast using algorithms. Alerts can also be viewed at multiple hierarchical levels, thereby providing LiveVault partners and end users with an indication of the overall health of their LiveVault environment
• API’s for billing and reporting which can be used to extract monthly LiveVault usage figures to feed into a partner’s billing process
• An automated “closing engine” for converting trials to paying customers – The Profit Maximisation Engine includes two key components; a Forecast Demand Simulation model and an Optimization Decision Support Engine. The Forecast Demand Simulation model uses regression analysis of historical data and Monte Carlo probabilistic simulation to forecast total data storage demand within the infrastructure replenishment time frame. This forecast is then fed into the optimization engine. The Optimization Decision Support Engine is a mathematical model of the infrastructure required to deliver services. This includes cost and engineering relationships. The Optimization Decision Support Engine determines optimal choices to minimize costs with respect to the timing of new infrastructure investments, subject to the requirement to meet forecast demand and the engineering relationships within the infrastructure

All of which sounds pretty much like rocket science until one talks with OneNet CEO and founder Dr Michael Snowden who, over the past 30 or so years has bought a highly scientific and analytical approach to both business improvement and technology. The convergence of these two themes speaks directly to the profit maximization technologies that OneNet has created for LiveVault. Of course LiveVault is only one solution and one could well expect the same sort of technology being used as an engine for many other technology problems.

I’d like to see what OneNet is doing in this area broadened into a stand along business improvement solution that other service providers (and, indeed, direct software vendors) could use. That would start to get interesting and deliver a solution not entirely dissimilar from that provided by start ups such as Totango.

MuleSoft rightly points out that APIs have created a kind of common language for the way enterprises will work into the future. The number of open APIs available is rapidly increasing and alongside these open APIs, there are a plethora of enterprise applications and data sources that, regardless whether they are on-premise or off, need to be connected to other applications. MuleSoft is betting that organizations will look to integration vendors to provide a broad platform that covers both what we consider integration to be today (give me a plug in to connect salesforce to NetSuite for example) but also that covers integration of a more distributed nature (let me connect these sensors with this analytics dashboard alongside our back office ERP system).

The platform is built as an integrated set of individual products. Users can utilize the bits of the platform that are of relevance to them, but also give themselves a roadmap in terms of their future technological direction. The different functional pieces are:

• Anypoint technology – enables point-to-point integration,

• CloudHub – A so-called integration platform as a service (iPaaS), offering the ability for enterprises to integrate SaaS applications with each other or to on-premise applications, as well as allowing SaaS providers to build and offer packaged integration applications that automate business processes across applications
• Mule ESB – An integration platform for connecting enterprise applications on-premise and to the cloud, eliminating the need for custom point-to-point integration code
• Anypoint Connectors – Out-of-the-box connectivity to hundreds of enterprise and SaaS applications
• API Solution – Built on top of the CloudHub iPaaS, this is a solution for designing, building, publishing, securing, managing and monetizing internal services and external APIs, as well as engaging the developer community around APIs:

• APIkit – New open source API design toolkit that helps developers generate consistent APIs that adhere to best practices, eliminating uncertainty and friction in creating new APIs
• Anypoint Service Registry – Announcing general availability today, a service registry and the easiest way for enterprises to govern and manage all of their internal services and APIs, both on-premise and in the cloud offering visibility, enforcement and lifecycle control
• API Manager – Newly released as beta today, a cloud-based API management cloud service allows enterprises to connect with business partners and create new revenue channels through a secure and scalable API strategy
• APIhub – A public repository and community for APIs, which allows developers and enterprises to discover and use over 13,000 APIs, and enables API providers to publish and document APIs, engaging the developer community on an open, collaborative platform
• Unified development experience – Designed to offer away to build integration applications, for deployment either on-premise or in the cloud

• Mule Studio – Graphical design environment for creating integration flows, making any developer into an integration developer
• Anypoint DataMapper – Graphical data mapping and transformation, enabling point-and-click data integration for SaaS and on-premise applications
• Anypoint Connector DevKit – Developer toolkit that allows developers to build Anypoint Connectors from any API in hours or days, not weeks

That’s a whole heap of technology and a fair few buzzwords to boot, but despite all that, MuleSoft is onto something here. Innovation in the future is going to rely on not only applications talking to each other but also the ability to interface between a plethora of different data sources and applications themselves. APIs are creating that connectivity and a broad based integration platform that includes both integration as we’ve always thought of it, alongside the mechanics to build and run a broad API suite, is a compelling proposition – as the number of possible endpoints increases – enterprises will increasingly look to deliver a consistent way to combine the different elements of those endpoints – to this end, MuleSoft is positioning itself smartly to compete in the new look enterprise.

Apparently investors agree with this perspective since the second piece of news today is that MuleSoft has raised an additional $37M, led by NEA. This round brings MuleSoft’s funding to date to a massive $81M and includes such luminaries as salesforce.com (a new investor), Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler, Lightspeed, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners According to the company, the funds will be used to fuel the company’s aggressive growth plans across both SaaS and enterprise parts of the business – which means we’re going to see a lot more enterprise sales folks pitching MuleSoft to blue chip customers.

Integration is one of the areas I’m picking for massive growth over the next few years – an integration play that is well positioned to capture the growth in connected sensors and devices is placing itself strongly to become a force to be reckoned with – MuleSoft will be one to watch moving forwards.

@benkepes indeed. Twitter is an intereting case because for bootstrapping the relation was inverted – now power balance is the other way…

— Josh Robb (@josh_robb) March 13, 2013

But Twitter isn’t the only example, recently Netflix decided to no longer issue developer keys for its public API.

But is this really a fair summary? Recently John Sheehan from RunScope wrote an excellent post in which he attempted to give developers some guidance when they’re thinking about building a service that takes advantage of platform APIs. Sheehan’s perspective is that in many cases the interests of the developer, and of the API provider, are not aligned. As Sheehan wrote:

Is an app that helps you manage your Netflix queue driving meaningful new subscriptions for Netflix? Probably not. Is another Twitter client helping Twitter sell and show you ads? Definitely not. When the most important transaction for Twitter was someone putting content into the network, it made sense to allow that content from anywhere. That’s no longer important to them. This is the future of Twitter APIs.

Sheehan’s post is a real wake up call, for a long time developers, and the industry at large, has been living in a kind of alternative reality. This skewed vision of the world assumes that platform companies will continue to invest time and resource to develop and maintain their public APIs regardless of whether doing so provides any real value back to the business. It’s almost like we’ve started to believe that these platform companies, commercial entities that they are, approach their public APIs as some kind of public good work that they do for the Karma.

Unfortunately this mindset has been encouraged by the investment world – on the one hand VCs have been quick to encourage developers to build solutions on top of other’s platforms – possibly to further their own opportunistic interests as investors in those same platforms. On the other hand VCs have been running around putting wads of cash into many of these end-point services, perhaps believing their own idealistic, if slightly shonky, view of the future.

In his post Sheehan advocates for a stronger dose of reality for people contemplating building a service on top of an API platform. As he wrote in his post, the three rules that companies need to remember are:

Thou shalt not freeload

For infrastructure and SaaS APIs, the relationship is clear: you pay for the value you receive either transactionally or as part of your subscription. For everything else, the provider of the API you are using should benefit equally or better from the value your use of the API is providing. If your app is not driving direct transactional value for the provider, you’re in a risky situation.

Thou shalt not forego talking to a person

An open API is a great way to test drive an integration, but it does not absolve you from the responsibility of building a relationship with the provider. If you can’t reach someone, that should be all the reason you need not to use that API.

Thou shalt monitor everything

Using a third-party API is code for your application that happens to run on someone else’s servers. Use the same level of rigor for monitoring and testing that you would for the code that runs on your own machines. When something goes wrong (and they will), have systems in place to notify you before your customers do.

Sheehan is absolutely on the ball here, his history (he was formerly at IFTTT – a company completely built on an API play) gives him a deep understanding of the economic drivers behind a vendor’s public APIs. But more broadly than the particular API perspective, Sheehan’s post points to a much more practical perspective on business that is arising in the industry. The reawakening of attention for enterprise software, the less than stellar post-IPO showing of a number of consumer facing companies (Zynga, Facebook, Groupon) and the oft-discussed series A crunch that means investors are looking for proven and defensible traction before funding a startup are all adding up to a far more pragmatic view of the world.

APIs are an amazing enabler of innovation, and an integral part of the way companies can build their product, their userbase and their presence – but unless they think about mutual benefit, a real relationship with the provider and a strong focus on making sure the “lights stay on”, that massive opportunity may just disappear in the blink of an API providers eye.

Why MySQL 5.6 is no real threat to NoSQL

Over the past couple of days a number of people have asked my opinion of the latest MySQL 5.6 release. For those who haven’t seen the news, Oracle announced its first major MySQL release in two years. Since NoSQL has grown rapidly in key markets where MySQL has historically been strong, I guess it’s not surprising that Oracle focused a lot of attention on addressing weaknesses that have made NoSQL such a big success. Tomas Ulin, VP of MySQL Engineering, even goes so far as to say that “MySQL can combine the best of both worlds” and “you no longer need two databases.”

Tomas and MySQL’s view of the database world seems to be that it will be no different than what it’s been for much of the last 40 years – mainly that relational technology can do it all and is the right technology for every need.

We don’t believe that. We believe we’re rapidly moving to an era where multiple database technologies are available to application developers and they will pick the right database for their particular use case and requirements. Each technology will have its inherent strengths and weaknesses and provide a very different set of tradeoffs to pick from. Sometimes a relational technology like MySQL will be a better fit (we certainly don’t believe relational technology is going away). Other times a document database like Couchbase will be the right fit.

This is why I don’t think MySQL 5.6 will have any affect on the rapid growth of NoSQL. The reason NoSQL is taking off isn’t because it has a hot feature or two. It’s because it has made a fundamentally different set of architectural choices and tradeoffs that many app developers prefer for the kinds of applications they’re developing today. Adding a feature to a relational database as a response to what people say they like about NoSQL isn’t going to change these fundamental differences.

For example, relational technology is fundamentally a schema-based technology of tables, rows, and columns. Adding a capability like the new online data definition language (DDL) in MySQL 5.6 to make it easier and less time consuming to change your schema doesn’t make a relational database schema-less. Nor does it address the fact that many developers find it far more intuitive and productive to work with documents (objects) in a document database than the tables in a relational database. So while this feature may be helpful to developers who have selected relational technology for its fundamental tradeoffs, it will do nothing to slow the wave of developers who have moved to document (or other) NoSQL databases for their fundamental tradeoffs.

Likewise, with MySQL 5.6′s new memcached API, it might make it easier for developers to access data using the classic get and set APIs, but the implementation is only skin deep. The data being stored still gets mapped to tables and columns at the storage tier. Developers still need to define their table schemas before using these APIs, which means that they still do not get the schema flexibility web applications need. Shredding data that is unstructured – and constantly changing in structure – so that it fits into tables and columns is a forced and inefficient approach.

As a side note it’s curious that the MySQL team seems out of step with other parts of Oracle. While the MySQL team seems to be convinced MySQL can do it all, Oracle’s NoSQL team seems to feel differently and is busily trying to catch up to NoSQL leaders like Couchbase, MongoDB, and Cassandra with their own NoSQL product. If relational technology is a one size fits all technology, why is Oracle itself making such a big investment in developing its own NoSQL product?

What we see is a whole new wave of applications that have very different requirements than applications had just a few years ago. More often than not they are cloud-based, need to support a huge and dynamically changing number of users, need to store huge amounts of data, and need a highly flexible data model that allows them to adjust to rapidly changing data capture requirements and process lots of semi-structured and unstructured data. The fundamentally different architectural decisions embedded in NoSQL technologies – along with the easy scalability, consistently high performance, and flexible data model advantages (along with all the other tradeoffs) NoSQL provides – are turning out to be a better fit for an increasing number of these applications.

That doesn’t mean MySQL (or relational databases) will go away or won’t play a significant role in the database industry in the future. It just means developers will have more choice (always a good thing) and that some very powerful trends are very well aligned with the strengths of NoSQL technology.

…by providing an SDK and a set of high-level APIs that sits on top of a fabric layer that connects all the different big data components in an optimal way – they’re delivering on the promise of making big data accessible to all.

Just as a reminder, Continuuity delivers a so-called “Big Data application fabric”, that aims to make it fast and easy for any developer to build, deploy, scale and manage Big Data apps. The platform offers a unified experience across the entire application lifecycle from development to DevOps. Continuuity provides pre-packaged building blocks with higher level APIs, Datasets, tooling and documentation that speed the big data application development process. The founders see four specific use cases for the Continuuity platform:

• Getting data in – event ingestion, data queuing and a core transaction engine
• A more traditional PaaS view of application containers- developers write code, package it up and deploy
• Ready established datasets – collections of data, stored down in the infrastructure with a higher level API. Continuuity provides some data aligned with common patterns in apps – time series, counters etc
• Data out- queries, via RESTful APIs and utilizing both preconfigured and self-built user stored procedures

Well after a few months in private beta, Continuuity is rolling out a public beta of both the developer suite and the developer sandbox. Specific parts of the news today are:

• Moving out of Private Beta to Public Beta of Developer Suite
  • Single node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
  • SDK
  • IDE plugins
  • Dataset Patterns to make data modeling and manipulation easy
  • Test harness
• Introducing the Public Beta of the Developer Sandbox
  • Free access to a self-service, cloud based, single tenant, single node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
  • Trial period of 90 days
  • 8 cores, 8GB of memory and 240GB of storage
• Combination of releasing these both to public beta together allows developers to have the full end-to-end Continuuity experience
• VPC and On-Prem are in Private Beta

To really get an idea of the sort of outcomes that Continuuity is delivering customers, I quizzed CEO Todd Papaioannou about an interesting case study from one of the private beta testers. The customer, which runs a social commerce platform, wanted to deliver targeted recommendations and personalization for users visiting their Web properties. They wanted to process events in real time from a variety of different data sources including all activity on their site (user clickstream, seller actions) as well as additional information about their users pulled from the Facebook API. These events, combined with their proprietary customer segmentation algorithms, allowed them to generate personalized per-user product recommendations and then use them at serving time by making queries directly into the Continuuity AppFabric.

Continuuity is providing a very interesting platform, and one which the current preoccupation with big data from all vendors will get a fair amount of attention – I’m looking forward to seeing some case studies from the public beta.

I’ve long said that I believe cloud is revolutionary – primarily because it melds technical innovations (virtualization, the web, APIs, etc.) with new ways of doing business (a utility model, subscription basis, ease of use). Put these two things together and you have a revolution.

To help get this message across I filmed some video recently and had it animated to punch the message home – enjoy 2:36 of a justification for why cloud is indeed a revolution.

Here’s part two… (and if you haven’t seen it, part one is here)

Gathering Clouds: How do you see not only the provider landscape, but the cloud landscape from a technology perspective changing over the next few years?

Ben Kepes: So that’s a difficult one, when you consider that we didn’t have Amazon Web Services little more than five years ago. It’s hard to kind of crystal ball gaze in terms of what’s coming. I think that cloud adoption will only continue to grow. That’s fairly obvious. I think that a lot of the barriers to entry, things like security and overall IT resistance will change. I think more and more people will be moving up the stack, and PaaS will really ascend over the next few years as infrastructure becomes a little commoditized. I think we will see some mega-vendors break out in the platform space. I think it’s fairly obvious that Salesforce will become the new Oracle, for example. But at the same time, we’ll see companies like Oracle and Microsoft start to win in the cloud, whether that’s by acquisition or development — who knows.

GC: Where is innovation happening and how is it happening and who’s driving it?

BK: Innovation’s happening everywhere. I think that there’s a lot of innovation happening in the platform space. I’ve been really excited by things Cloud Foundry has been doing. I think more broadly in terms of not so much organizations but more where I see opportunities, I’m really excited by solutions that straddle a broad range of different services. My theory, or my thesis, is that over time, organizations will use more and more discrete and disparate services from different vendors, and so if I can straddle as many of those in my mind is a good bet. So I’m really bullish about companies, for example, like Twilio, that are doing voice APIs over a broad range of applications. Similarly I’m excited about companies like the API management companies, cloud management companies like enStratus and RightScale. Anyone that straddles a bunch of different services, and helps to bring some clarity across that breadth is in a good space I believe.

GC: Amongst the companies that are leading the charge from a technology perspective, where do you see collaboration happening, and what new opportunities is that collaboration creating?

BK: Sure. So you know, obviously OpenStack is a pretty amazing infrastructure initiative where you got 200 vendors getting together for what, for their own betterment, for sure, but for the betterment of the community, so that’s really exciting. I think service providers, we’re seeing some interesting things in terms of large service providers, the likes of telcos and banks like this, doing a bit of sort of service aggregation, whether that’s applications or whether that’s some storage or infrastructure. I think we’ll see some interesting plays in terms of that aggregation moving forward.

GC: On open source, do you believe that it’s a way to improve the promise or even the premise of what cloud could be, or is it really just establishing a broader or more standardized status quo?

BK: I think its changing things. I believe that open source lowers barriers to entry. It increases innovation because there aren’t commercial barriers to innovation occurring. As an extension of that, open source is different actually; it’s significantly changed the landscape. Not only because of the obvious reasons: because you have an open competitor, in the formerly proprietary space, but also because you have innovation built on top of that open source platform.

GC: Looking more broadly at the major players in the space, both providers and then the companies actually developing the technology: who’s doing it right and who’s doing it wrong?

BK: I think it’s a nascent space so it’s hard to say who is doing things right, given that we don’t really know because we’re all new at this. I would say that anyone that’s cloud-washing (NOTE: To read an insightful article on Forbes regarding Logicworks CEO Ken Ziegler’s perspective on cloud-washing, click here), anyone who’s taking a regular product and calling it cloud is doing it wrong. I’d say that anyone that’s trying to increase lock-in is doing it wrong. Anyone that’s not building solutions with open APIs is doing it wrong. Anyone that’s not enabling broad browser-based mobile access is doing it wrong. So there’s a few kind of general statements in there, but overall it’s too early to say specifically which vendor has it particularly wrong.

GC: Thinking about the prevalence of tech-empowered start-ups all over the world, from London to U.S. cities like Boston, Austin and New York, to Asia, Australia and New Zealand: has the way the economy has been trending over the past decade pushed people to start being smarter about how they approach creating a business and, in so doing, move people closer to the cloud? Is that why we’ve seen such a big boom over the last four years?

BK: Yeah, absolutely. I think what we’re seeing is a real convergence in that cloud is an enabler. You’ve seen convergence around organizations’ desire or demand or need for agility, around generational changes, with millenials coming through, and the use of lightweight, agile tools. We’ve moved to ubiquitous mobile access, project specific tech. All these things are kind of converging together. And the technologies that cloud delivers answer those needs and on the expectations. Michael Andreeson famously discussed the “software-ization of the world.” We’ve seen a kind of move from sort of monolithic organizations to much smaller, more refined organizations, and the software startup is sort of the epitome of that change.

GC: What are your views with regard to mobile and cloud, how those two are coming together, where they’re overlapping and interacting, and how they can come together more cohesively in the future.

BK: So I think that part of the difficulty is around the use of marketing words here. Mobile is a pretty simple concept, but we’re using it in different ways throughout cloud. I think clearly that cloud enables mobile access of data. It’s absolutely central to the demands of a mobile workforce. So yes, more and more, people will see that cloud, which obviously is a really broad term, but cloud and its broader guise is going to be an enabler of a mobile workforce. So yeah, I think more and more, those two terms will come together, but clearly in many situations where marketing terms are being bandied around, regardless of whether they are applicable or not.

GC: Right. Are there any companies that you see that are really putting the two technology paradigms closer together in a holistic and smart way?

BK: Sure. Salesforce has Dreamforce next week [at the time of this interview] in San Francisco and they will be announcing some changes that very much deliver the mobile cloud promise. Other companies like Box for example, who is doing a great job of taking content from the clouds and delivering it across mobile platforms. At the software layer, there’s a lot of stuff going on that, which really converges and improves those two things. And it’s most applicable and I think it’s most obvious at the software level versus the infrastructure or platform level. How many people actually want to have virtualization available on mobile or deploy their apps via mobile device?

GC: So earlier in the conversation, you had talked about sort of your view of platform-as-a-service and SaaS really leading the charge, and infrastructure-as-a-service being something that has grown quite considerably in the past, but will not necessarily continue as predominantly in the future. But after SaaS, after PaaS, and after IaaS, what’s the next phase that you anticipate cloud moving toward?

BK: I’m looking forward to when we don’t talk about how cloud is a specific thing anymore, just kind of there, in the same way we don’t talk about our cell phone delivery networks as such, we just use the devices. So I think we’ll get to that point. In terms of what’s the next big area or the next big acronym, and I wouldn’t put an acronym to it, but it will be the kind of platform, where previously separate areas are glued together from across the stack and up and down the stack of the next big area is something Whether it will be parallel to IaaS or PaaS, I don’t really know because I don’t really buy those terms. But I think integration and aggregation services more generally are going be the next kind of area to rise.

GC: As cloud has gained a visible presence within the echo chamber that is IT publications, there seems to be a similar rise in the amount of discussion around big data as it relates to cloud. I was wondering if you could share your perspectives on that.

BK: There are an exponentially growing number of connected devices. And with the rise of the internet and the parallel development of inanimate devices being able to talk to the internet, there is much more data than ever before.  Deriving some meaning or some sense from that data is going to be an opportunity as well as a big problem area.  So the whole concept around big data is totally valid. Actually I get multiple pitches every day, and most of them have some big data as part of the underlying business model. But often regardless of whether the solution being described has anything to do with big data or not. So it’s definitely the buzz word du jour. So like with cloud, people are jumping on the word and just throwing it around because they feel they need to check that box.

GC: Does cloud enable that conversation and that particular buzz word though, more readily five years ago when you’d have to have a giant Oracle database to crunch that large scale data? I mean, cloud enabled people to use Hadoop, so it’s giving a whole range of businesses access to this tool that wouldn’t have previously been able to leverage it.

BK: So I think cloud enables people to get insight into their world and connect with their world. One of those insights, one of those connections is through the use of big data. So yes, cloud is an enabler for big data and the value it can provide a company.

GC: What is the industry going to look like two years, out and then five years from now? What are you seeing?

BK: Sure. So I mean, obviously Bill Gates famously said that we over estimate what we can achieve in the short term and under estimate what we may achieve in the long term.

I think he’s right. In two years’ time we will still be arguing about public versus private, cloud-washing, open-washing and green-washing and all those sorts of things. So the conversations will be similar, though there will be a much higher rate of adoption, and there will be a bunch more solutions.

Five or ten years’ time, I think we’re talking some serious differences. Because at that point, we will actually see some turnover in terms of contemporary IT staff moving on and a new generation of IT leaders coming in. We’ll see the sun-setting of a lot of legacy technologies in favor of new products much advanced beyond where they are today. So I think five to ten years forward at the very minimum everyone will be using virtualization, but moving forward more and more workloads will be in the public cloud, and the public cloud is available on a granular basis. There will be lots of differentiation on service at different levels. I hope in five to ten years’ time the term “cloud” has kind of dissipated. We are using the cloud and doing the cloud, so the word should similarly be increasingly irrelevant.

GC: I’m particularly interested in your views on the public, private, and hybrid cloud debate. they are the three primary buckets of cloud being sold now, but will this change? It seems to me that a lot of innovation is occurring at the public cloud level, but there’s a lot more publicly being stated about the public cloud and its virtues and its problems than there is about the private or hybrid versions. Are they going to remain in those silos? Or are they going change?

BK: I think they’re going to change. And you’re right, I mean, clearly public by definition more public, so there’s more attention there. But I think there’s going be a convergence because people are going to be less dogmatic about “one ring to rule them all,” so to speak. More organizations will have a real hybrid strategy, where they’ll be doing some stuff in the public cloud, they’ll be having their own private cloud, they’ll probably have a virtual private cloud  with a third-party vendor, as well as some stuff at traditional on-premise. But the future is very heterogeneous, and I think that’s only going increase.

GC: What is missing in the cloud industry, both on the manage service provider side, and also on the technology development side?

BK: I think we’re missing a real level of pragmatism. We’re at a stage in this industry where the competition’s being driven by marketing and being driven by dogma. What we’re electing through this lack of pragmatism is simple use. Instead we should be standing back and looking at whether what we are framing is the right solution. Ultimately we need to understand and accept that one flavor isn’t right for all kinds of customers and prospects.