It seems in the past couple of years it has been chic to pronounce the demise of the mainframe as greatly exaggerated. And while previous reports cite a percentage representative of a commanding majority of IT executives favoring mainframes for their long-term objectives, the truth is that the developer corps familiar and comfortable with working on mainframe computing is slowly and steadily fading away. Up and coming developers are focusing their efforts on new technologies.

But where can the Enterprise turn for their future data center needs? Certainly the conversations in boardrooms across the business landscape have turned to the subject of ‘the cloud.’ Despite the rising popularity of cloud, a recent survey shows less than 75 percent of the public at-large really had only a cursory understanding, at best, of what cloud technology is.

Addressing these findings, managing director of the domain registrar that conducted the survey, 123-reg, Matt Mansell stated, “Cloud grows in popularity with each year that passes in business spheres with business owners taking advantage of the flexibility and scalability that it brings.” And, in fact, early adopters have found great value in utilizing compute that is cloud based. As the cloud continues its march toward maturity, many in the Enterprise are asking how they can implement private cloud that behaves like the public cloud.

The good news, according to SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier, is that the innovation needed to effect that change is happening now. Commenting on the significant increase in attendance at the recent OCPSummit, Furrier said, “You see the revolution happening. There’re hardware guys and there’re software guys. What you have here is the confluence of software engineering happening here.” He continued, “This is how the Mac came about and this is what is happening in the data center.”

The CTO for Wikibon, David Floyer, is a huge proponent for the next generation cloud-based data center and he believes the Enterprise should move quickly to educate themselves on the new technology and implement it in their companies. “Building your own data center is wasted money. Adding to your footprint is wasting money,” Floyer stated. “Move it out to mega data centers. Major cloud providers are now in the business of mega data centers.” This he believes will yield a trove of external data from areas such as social media and Internet of Things that companies will be able to “…explore and exploit to drive innovation and new ways of marketing.”

It is the promise of this new innovation that has led many Enterprise customers to signal their own commitment by making 2014 the year they are finally allocating budgeting for cloud deployment and the modernized data center.

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