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Contributed by Jesse Proudman, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Blue Box
Big bets are getting bigger: convergence, transformation, and bold changes
Over the last year, we’ve seen big bets getting more bold. We see more CIO’s attending conferences on transformation and staying relevant. We’ve seen enormous enterprise bellwether companies like Dell go private, announce larger mergers (Dell & EMC), and attempt to disrupt their space. Big Blue (IBM) acquired Blue Box in June of this year.
For the past 15 years, I-along with a phenomenal team-have invested mental and physical energy into creating and building a successful cloud infrastructure company. We went from dorm-room startup and two funding rounds to a major milestone.
Many would think that this milestone would be the finish line: the ideal culmination of an entrepreneurial venture. But for Blue Box, joining IBM has enabled us to dream bigger dreams. That dream is driven by a game plan focused on where we think the market is headed: the convergence of public and private cloud.
Enterprises of tomorrow have figured out that differentiation through IT infrastructure is a losing game. Sustainable success rests solely on differentiation through application innovation, and speed to market is key. Enterprises need an agile cloud infrastructure and a DevOps culture to remain competitive. But security and control are still critical.
The cloud revolution has led enterprises to demand cloud on their own terms, whether that means building their own private cloud, using a distribution, signing up with a public cloud provider, or a combination. In fact, more enterprises are seeking infrastructure that looks and behaves like public cloud but is behind their firewall and physically under their control. This type of hybrid cloud approach is the preferred model for capturing the benefits of public and private clouds in a seamless way.
I believe this is the future of cloud. In even bolder terms, over the next five years we will see the convergence of public and private cloud. There will be no meaningful distinction between the two. (Pricing models might be one exception, but even that is converging.) The architectures and platforms we associate with public and private clouds are converging into a monolithic model, one characterized by:
- logical security and compliance features that mirror existing standards
- open APIs, hardware designs and (increasingly) open software
- reliance upon software, not hardware, to manage application availability
- abstracting hardware further from the cloud operations software
The result of these forces is that increasingly similar cloud architectures are being deployed on both sides of the firewall.
That’s the future we’re building at IBM. The promise of “write once, run anywhere” is getting closer. As we continue to abstract the levels of complexity from infrastructure through the application stack, we make this promise more real. This puts customers in control, no longer forcing them to make artificial cloud architecture choices that limit future options and increase risk. Part of this is having the range of products that we have.
Combining forces, Blue Box and IBM plan to lead in this convergence of public and private clouds, and for those who share our vision, the sky’s the limit.
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About the Author
Jesse Proudman is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Blue Box, an IBM Company. More at www.blueboxcloud.com.
