Research analyst firm IDC's study on global workloads finds that before 2020, 42% of the total server installed base and 67% of associated storage capacity will be off-premises, either in colocation or cloud services. Whether as part of a pure colo or hybrid IT strategy, or a hybrid or public cloud plan, the trend is clearly toward third-party services provision.

DCD>Colo+Cloud's plenary kickoff sessions comprise keynote presentations and panel discussions with IBM SoftLayer COO, Francisco Romero; Digital Realty CEO, Bill Stein; Equinix senior innovation director, Ron Batra; T5 Data Centers COO, Aaron Wagenheim, and CyrusOne chief strategist, Jonathan Schildkraut.

In the era of digital transformation, "Are you now ready for the emergent tsunami of data traffic?" asks Equinix innovation strategist Batra. "How will you scale from k-bytes to zettabytes?"

"In today's workload lifecycle management world," says DCD's Bruce Taylor, "whether you're the enterprise user or the third-party services provider, knowing how you will manage workloads into the future for the greatest cost-benefit, reliability, efficiency, security, and resiliency becomes the most important consideration."

DCD>Edge

"Nearly everything that is meant by digital transformation happens first at the edge," says DCD CEO George Rockett. "We're delighted that Schneider Electric's director of the industrial edge and Caroline Chan, Intel's VP/GM of 5G mobility infrastructure will join other edge engineering experts in helping give shape to the technology design requirements for edge application workloads."

The cloud factory of the future will increasingly be highly scaleable, agile, open-source, and commoditized. Gaining expertise in this DevOps and workload- oriented environment is a key to future competitiveness.

If you'd like to attend the DCD>Colo + Cloud you can register here.