The IT industry is a decade into a 30-year journey to the cloud, says visionary David Scott, Senior VP for Storage at Hewlett-Packard. “The debate about whether cloud will be a big part of the future of computing is almost ended now,” he told Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante in an interview on SiliconAngle.TV from the 2011 HP Discover Conference Monday. “We probably have 20 years to go. We’re probably going to go through phases of private cloud deployments, but everything’s going to eventually end up as delivery of IT-as-a-service.”

And, he added, HP’s strategy of building a highly interconnected infrastructure is aligned well with “the way the world is about to evolve.”

Vellante said that a recent Wikibon.org survey of about 200 of its members turned up a surprising statistic – only about 12% said they were pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy. While some of that could reflect different definitions of the term “hybrid cloud”, he said it also looks as if a lot of the industry marketing may be ahead of reality. In light of that, he asked, did Scott see in terms of hybrid cloud development.

“It’s definitely occurring,” Scott said. And, some customers he talks to are actually moving to the next step and using not one but two infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors. These advanced organizations are using the two vendors as dual data centers and for instance exploring creating DR replication and fail-over capabilities between them.

“I think this is a very exciting vision of where things are going, because a lot of people are concerned about if they lock themselves into an IaaS vendor, how do they ever get out.” By starting with two vendors, these companies always have an alternative. They can move between the two to get the best deals or the functionality or service levels they need for a particular application.

“It is the multivendor cloud,” he said, “And I think you will start seeing things like bursting capabilities being enabled not just between a private and public cloud but between the public clouds themselves.”

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