The cloud is driving new business models in the enterprise, forcing IT departments and service providers to adjust in the face of changing demands and increased competition. Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante addressed this trend at EMC World 2013, where he hosted a panel discussion featuring three prominent business and technology leaders: Sean Wedige, the CTO of Global Enterprise Solutions for Rackspace, SunGard Recovery Services’ Michael de la Torre, and Kevin Leahy of Dimension Data.

Vellante opens the session with a rundown of the cloud’s journey so far: Amazon Web Services entered the scene in 2006, and quickly gained traction among developers and SMBs. Larger organizations started paying attention to the public cloud in the aftermath of the economic recession, and the rise of shadow IT in 2010-2011 helped cement this trend as a force to be reckoned with. Vellante believes that the cloud is now entering a new phase that will be centered on deeper integration with business processes.

The way Vellante sees it, Amazon is a threat to competing providers because it’s an 800-pound gorilla that doubles as an industry innovator. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, he notes: when it comes to cloud computing one size does not fit all, and there’s plenty of whitespace left to fill. Rackspace’s Sean Wedige agrees with Vellante’s assessments and adds that CIOs have started making big bets on the cloud. There’s no denying that Amazon is the elephant in the room, but OpenStack has emerged as a challenger that gives organizations more choices in terms of security and control. From a services perspective, buyers are spending more time – and money – identifying solutions that fit into their use cases.

De la Torre takes over and explains how the public cloud affected his company. He tells the audience that SunGard leverages the technology to provide disaster recovery to customers around the world, a task it could not accomplish in the past off its five data centers.
Dimension Data general manager Kevin Leahy says it’s all about integration. Companies that rely on multiple platforms and services tend to manage their solutions as isolated projects, but this is starting to change. He says that customers are seeking out service providers to help them define polices, and help them enforce these polices across a consistent automated stack that spans private, public and hybrid clouds, as well as multiple geographical locations.

To hear the entire panel discussion, check out the video below.