One of the people who attended last week’s Intel Forecast is Ben Kepes, and the analyst hopped into theCube for twenty minutes to discuss his take on some of the trends that are maturing today (full video below). The first topic was the cloud.

Kepes sees the cloud not necessarily as a big innovation from the technology stand point, but rather as a combination of existing components that makes sense from the business perspective. The economics of scale and the bottom line results that the cloud delivers are simply too great to ignore, and that’s the main driver behind this delivery model’s very rapid adoption.

An extension of this is the consumerization of infrastructure, and Kepes says that as a result companies have an opportunity to move up the value chain – he noted VMware’s Cloud Foundry as an example, and returned to the PaaS later in the conversation.

Furrier moved the interview to enterprise case studies, inquiring about the ones that catch Kepes’ attention. The analyst divides this area into two categories: the reliable examples, such as email and calibration that are moved to the cloud, and the more exciting ones.

Kepes believes that today and in the near future as well, back office software with social elements is going  to see a lot of growth. But further down the road he sees big data emerging in the enterprise, and there are a few very convincing reasons for that.

A growing amount of end points are generating more and more data, and that allows for more insight to be drawn and leveraged in practically every department. And as SiliconAngle founding editor John Furrier added, real-time analytics is also disrupting storage and compute in the data center.

Another area that the two looked into was PaaS – a still relatively young sector according to Kepes, who says there is still a lot of room for vendors to differentiate. He believes that specialized platforms will be something that will pick up momentum, and they will probably be built on top of open solutions such as Cloud Foundry.