Krishnan Subramanian, the CEO of research firm Rishidot, took some time off during the Intel Developers Forum to discuss his take on the cloud and what we can expect to see next from this booming industry. He shared his vision with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier in this interview (full video below).

Subramanian says that for him two things stood out at the conference: abstraction and mobile computing. Addressing the latter point first, the analyst believes that trends such as BYOD are going change the way things are done in the enterprise on a very fundamental level. He goes into more detail about the computing aspect, an area where the consumer space and enterprises are on a collision course.

Subramanian’s take is that these two segments are converging, slowly but surely. On the long haul he envisions a shift in the way the cloud is perceived – not something delivered “up there” by multiple cloud service providers, but rather a core component of every end point.  In this future, consumer devices will act as nodes in a network, and the cloud will take on a role akin to the one Google is filling today with its search engine: where the data flows to the service.

Another topic that Furrier and Subramanian survey in the discussion is the concept of the P2P cloud. This idea would be represented by a highly federated environment that caters to niche users and communicates with other clouds, but there’s one major obstacle standing in the way. Interoperability is something that the industry has to address, and Subramanian believes that it eventually will, as smaller players begin to disrupt this vertical and drive Amazon, Google and Microsoft to follow suit.

The analyst says that the software-defined datacenter will be what enables this shift. He highlights VMware’s acquisition of DynamicOps as a critical milestone towards realizing all of the goals he listed throughout the interview.

See Subramanian’s full interview below: