An unStructured Future For Cloud Computing

I've spent the last few days here in San Francisco attending the 5th annual Structure conference put on by GigaOM. The event brings at the same time an impressive mixture of cloud computing influencers, pundits and entrepreneurs, at times referred to as the "clouderati." The conference is a great place to connect with the people and companies innovating, shaping and defining the ongoing evolution in the innovation industry.

There seemed to be an underlying sense that cloud computing is no longer the new kid on the block with one person noting that "the shine is gone." Regardless of the whether cloud is or isn't exciting for some, it's become perverse. In a conversation with Michael Skok, a venture capitalist at North Bridge Venture Partners, he told me that cloud computing has become the standard operating procedure for any company looking at building or deploying software today. It's no longer a question of whether a company should deploy to the cloud, however instead how and when.

Skok was at the conference to unveil his VC firm's 2012 Future of Cloud Computing annual survey results. The survey includes more than 785 respondents and dozens of collaborators, including vendors just as Amazon Web Services, Citrix, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, SAP and VMWare. According to Skok, he's seeing "cloud vault ahead of its early shroud of doubt and skepticism with a full 50 percent of respondents reporting confidence in cloud for mission-critical applications." He went on to note "We're as well seeing surging interest in PaaS as the foundation for building new applications with 75% of respondents expecting to build new apps on a PaaS platform over the at once five years."

The former CEO of MySQL

Mårten Mickos the former CEO of MySQL and current CEO of Cloud infrastructure software company Eucalyptus told me the future of cloud computing is in explosion of data and helping companies navigate the multitude of options in deploying traditional application to the cloud. Mickos was at the conference promoting the latest version of his companies open source software.

Tom Leyden, Director of Business Development at Amplidata which provides optimized object storage systems for Big Data as well noted that "Data is at the heart of cloud computing." I heard from several people who told me that dealing with the influx of massive amounts of unstructured data is becoming a major challenge for enterprises.

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