What Are the Leading Trends in Cloud Computing?

[This article was written by Clark Buckner.]

 Bernard Golden is the Vice President of Strategy for ActiveState Software. At this year’s Interop, he will lead the next-generation cloud applications workshop. I invited Bernard on the show to discuss his involvement at Interop, cloud computing trends, the challenges that present themselves when adopting cloud-based solutions, and his advice for decision-making CIOs and CTOs.

Here are a few of the highlights from our conversation:

TechnologyAdvice: What can we expect from you at this year’s Cloud Connect?

BERNARD: The workshop is designed to share the leading trends going on in applications within enterprise space. It's a peek into the future (or at least the advanced present), for people [to see] how things are developing. It's a terrific lineup of guests. We have some of the leading thinkers and people employed in some of the leading companies around the world, who will come and share their experience and knowledge of what's going on in their space. So we have people representing mobile API's and platforms as service.

This is now an expanded edition. The first time, the Interop folks said, "That was great. Could you do that again? If there's more content that you can bring, we’d love to make it a full day.” So we have expanded it.

[Listen to the complete interview]

We have another section on DevOps, and we're having a section on innovation labs, and on implementation—essentially:

• How do we get faster innovation?
• How do we emulate the Internet industry?
• How do we become faster and more agile?

The overarching theme of this application workshop is: what's going on in the frontier? Plus a whole range of technologies, disciplines, and practices that will affect how the future of enterprise is going to evolve. Let's bring in the kind of leaders working in these fields, people who are out in the frontier, and have them share their experience, best practices, and recommendations.

TA: What trends do you see recurring in cloud-computing?

BERNARD: One of the interesting things about Enterprise IT is that it's moving from the back office to a frontline position. Most companies’ products and services are becoming IT-enabled. And so, the overarching theme is: How do you go faster?

How do you become more agile? How can you deliver application and functionality to the market more quickly? There’s going to be a tremendous amount of conversation on how leveraging these technologies improves [processes]. How does it accelerate the application life cycle? How does it help these organizations bring things to the market faster? That's going to be really infusing every session.

It's going to be very eye-opening for people to be exposed to areas that they may not have thought about or have experienced personally.

TA: What challenges does this “backline to frontline” movement create?

BERNARD: One of them is: how do I absorb the new software products, components, and different technologies that are part of that? Part of going from the back office to frontline is there's been a trend to mobile as being the priority interface for many, many users. So how do I get better at mobile?

I think the other thing a lot of companies have to deal with is that many of their processes have deliberately been designed to not allow things to flow in a very fast fashion. They’ve had these kind of change control boards, iTel processes, all designed to be very structured, very risk averse, but it has the effect of really slowing things down. So, a lot of organizations have to really reevaluate their processes and figure that out, and we're addressing that with a section on DevOps.

TA: What advice would you give decision-making CIOs and CTOs?

BERNARD: I'm the Cloud Computing Adviser for CIO Magazine. I blog there on trends and how to leverage them. For a starting point, I think it's important for most IT people to [understand that] what got you here won't get you to where you want to go.

[This means] there are whole sets of practices and assumptions and software products that were perfectly appropriate 10 to 15 years ago. They made perfect sense. They were really very powerful, very useful. But going forward, those are now really outmoded, and if anything— they're hindrances to what you need to able to do now.

So, it's really important to be open to new technologies and processes. To take onboard: what are the advanced companies doing in this space? What are they doing in terms of DevOps processes? What are they doing in terms of the way they design and architect their applications? How do they run operations? What tools do they use for all of these things? What componentry? Because that's really where Enterprise IT is going.

To learn more about cloud-computing, connect with Bernard on Twitter @BernardGolden, visit ActiveState.com, or talk to Bernard while at Cloud Connect at Interop Las Vegas.

Listen to the entire show above in order to hear our full conversation, or download the show to listen later. You can subscribe to the Interop TA Expert Interview Series via Soundcloud in order to get alerts about new interviews.

This interview was provided by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company that connects buyers and sellers of business technology through meaningful relationships. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.