Eric Wolford from Riverbed on Cloud Computing trends

I had the opportunity to meet with Eric Wolford, senior vice president for marketing and business development at riverbed in San Francisco last week, and I asked him a couple of questions about his vision regarding cloud computing. 

Cloud computing, as we know, is appealing to the industry because it enables enterprises to rent their IT as a service, instead of buying it. Often, such data centre rented from third-party, include infrastructure, processing power, storage, applications etc. But what is really new into all this? Those who have been around for a long time, Eric Wolford says, already knew about co-location, hosting, ASP etc. which are terms and trends which have been around for long time. Yet, Eric stresses two underlying trends which are of paramount importance: consolidation and virtualisation. These two trends "have been going for quite some time" Eric adds and are important and will not disappear. The term cloud computing may go, but not the underlying trends of consolidation and virtualisation underneath it.

Terms come and go, Eric conclude, but the reality is that the data is concentrating, and that the workforce is further and further away from the data.