Our guest on the podcast this week is Robert Christiansen, Vice President, Cloud Adoption Practice Lead at Cloud Technology Partners. We discuss a basic framework for cloud adoption in large enterprises based on learnings from over 400 client engagements at Cloud Technology Partners. Through these experiences, patterns have emerged that can be used to make strategies for engaging large enterprises in cloud adoption despite early fear and uncertainty.  A key step is to put together an internal cloud team or Cloud Business Office (CBO) with buy-in from all departments including legal so that adoption can move forward with full support. The beginning of enterprise cloud migration can sometimes be more about changing psychology over changing technology. 

David Linthicum sat down with Rackspace CTO John Engates and Navica CEO Bernard Golden to discuss private cloud's value in today's quickly growing public cloud market. 

In 2013, we saw many CTP clients using OpenStack based tools for their private cloud initiatives. Fast forward to 2016 and public cloud is 3.5x the size of private cloud adoption, according to a Wikibon report. As more features and functions are released by the public cloud providers, enterprises are rightfully asking where the private cloud business case exists anymore.

Despite the increasing popularity of public cloud’s on-demand, pay-per-use model, private cloud still has a place in the enterprise, and its adoption continues to grow across platforms. There remains legitimate reasons to own and manage your own technology infrastructure, and private clouds bring some of the benefits of cloud principles to such data center deployments.

For Episode 100 of The Doppler podcast, David Linthicum sat down with private cloud proponent John Engates, and private cloud skeptic Bernard Golden to moderate a discussion around the future of private cloud and its business value in IT’s dynamic landscape.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Chris Wolf, VP & CTO, Americas at VMware. We discuss how the VMware-AWS deal came from listening directly who customers who wanted to leverage the public cloud while continuing to leverage the best private cloud they were already using. The partnership will allow customers more flexibility and agility in their cloud strategies. So, what’s in it for AWS? A level of intimacy with enterprise IT they have not previously had access to. The world will continue to rely on hybrid cloud infrastructure for years to come because large enterprises cannot move as quickly, and may not have the finances or skills to jump into public cloud. With Microsoft Azure Stack being released soon, this partnership is strategically timed to allow customers to try out this new flexibility first.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Alex Williams, Founder at The New Stack. We discuss the transformation from container-based environments to orchestration-based environments. Docker’s entry into the cloud provided a lot of free options for companies, but many companies don’t know how to leverage these open-source ecosystems. Docker and other container-management systems allow us an alternative to virtualization, and it seems safer for enterprises to leapfrog VMware or VMware on AWS and move directly to containers. This provides advanced security and governance immediately though most enterprises feel Docker is out of reach because they already have VMware currently running at their data centers. Serverless Architecture systems like AWS Lambda and IBM OpenWhisk provide a comparatively low-cost solution but an added level of complexity of implementation that excludes many enterprises. Last, we discuss how Microsoft may not need Windows anymore. The battle of the Operating Systems may be over soon because most people now run services online instead of on their operating system.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Dana Gardner, President and Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. We discuss the VMware-AWS deal that has the potential to bring many more companies with private servers into the cloud. We look at how the strategy for AWS is not to lock-in customers to their platform alone, but to work with vendors like VMware to support customers implementing hybrid cloud strategies to further grow the Amazon customer base. With many more vendor partnerships in the cloud industry, there is now a shift to enterprises aligning themselves around a cloud ecosystem, not just a platform anymore. We look at AWS and Microsoft Azure as the leaders in public cloud who may soon enter a price war that will commoditize public cloud. With the commoditization of public cloud, specialized high-margin services and applications that add value to the cloud will carry the industry forward from artificial intelligence to big data insights to predictive analytics and more. 

Our guest on the podcast this week is Brian Gracely, Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat. We discuss transition from Red Hat being known for Linux to their current status as leaders in the cloud computing industry. We are emerging into a space now where efficiency is the objective. Reinventing technology is not as crucial as building highly elastic, highly scalable cloud environments to bring companies forward. We look at the future of Microsoft and whether or not Windows will continue to be a focus as they adapt to the changing technology scene. One of the places where Microsoft beats AWS is in their sales force and ability to form long-term relationships with customers who appreciate the in-person assistance they provide. This key element puts them in a great position to grow with Azure in the future.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Reuven Cohen, VP of Growth at Aporeto. We discuss the future of machine learning. Almost anyone can access the power of machine learning today to build their own applications without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Taking the complexity out of cloud management makes it accessible to the mainstream and easier to focus on minute improvements. The ultimate value of machine learning comes from being able to put data into context to make key business decisions. We discuss new improvements to AWS for machine learning speed and what the best path forward is for Google to compete in the space.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Chirag Mehta, Silicon Valley Product Executive and Adjunct Faculty at Santa Clara University. We discuss careers in cloud computing, emphasizing the importance of quality Data Scientists and Product Managers. There is currently a lack in Data Science talent, and the road to more is through training both at the university level and by current employers. It is hard to cultivate a data mindset, because it requires a level of creativity and willingness to experiment. Each data set tells a story, and talented Data Scientists either know the right questions to ask or can find the right questions by observing trends in the data.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Bernard Lin, VP, Principal Architect at Cloud Technology Partners. We discuss Blockchain, the underlying technology that makes Bitcoin possible by allowing all transactions to be shared on a single ledger for increased transparency. Use of Blockchain means that transactions no longer need to include any trust-based organizations and leads to a more efficient transaction that can be processed immediately, a lower cost transaction because no external parties are involved, and a more secure transaction. We also look at whether or not there is still a need for private clouds with the current focus on hybrid and public clouds.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Stephen Foskett, Organizer in Chief at Tech Field Day. We discuss the balance between defining industry-wide cloud standards and having the freedom to move quickly for a company like Docker. As they grow, they must navigate the democratic open-source process at their foundation. We also look at Intel’s new Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator (CIAO) project that may be too late to the game to compete with OpenStack.