Agility may be the key to succeeding in today’s tech market, but Howie Xu, previously of Cisco Systems, Inc. and VMware, Inc., and now an executive in residence at Greylock Partners, believes resilience will be the key to long-term success. Curing VMworld 2015, Xu joined John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, and founder of SiliconANGLE, to talk about what’s next in the battle for the enterprise cloud market.

New world versus old world

As the tech industry has shifted focus from raw specs to solution-focused apps, Xu said the term “business outcomes” has become more of a marketing buzzword than a robust concept. He likes to define it differently. “When I think about business outcomes, it’s actually something extremely concrete,” he explained. “In the past, the IT industry was about delivering resilience, with the security, with the savings. But now it’s about delivering the new business outcomes, delivering the new applications at speed. So there is a collision between the resilience and agility.”

“At the end of the day, it’s really about that collision,” Xu added. “It’s the new world versus the old world.”

The implementation of cloud technology

In many ways, the competition for the implementation of cloud technology is like a “double header” baseball game, Xu stated. Amazon won game one — consumer cloud — but the outcome of the enterprise game is a little less obvious.

“Amazon certainly won the game for the agility,” he said. “However, they’ve yet to [prove] that it has enough security, it has enough resilience. Now, you can say that some of that is just emotional and people just need to get used to it. But the thing is …. people do not appreciate [the resilience] enough. So Amazon needs to work on it. Yet the traditional vendors, they need to add agility into their products. So that’s a race. That’s the second game.”

Security the next big thing

What is Xu keeping his eye on for the future? “There are two particular sectors I am personally interested in … [one is] DevOps; the other is security. Security is completely broken,” he said. “Pick a random person. That person can probably download some scripts … and then break into a random data center. That’s how robust our secure data center is today … security’s not there. So my point is that security will be the next big thing.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE