Research firm Wikibon has been hard at work assessing the newest trends and developments in Big Data and cloud services. These trends have been disruptive and fast changing in a space that’s become reluctant to adopt new changes quickly: the enterprise. So what’s actually going on?

Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined David Floyer, cofounder and CTO of Wikibon, and Brian Gracely, analyst, cloud computing of Wikibon, at the Amazon re:Invent 2015 event in Las Vegas to get a handle on that very question.

Migration: To augment or start anew?

According to Floyer, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) needs to pass the acid test: running any application on the cloud. In addition, it needs to develop its ability to deliver Database-as-a-Service for large systems to convince established enterprise consumers that it’s worth moving to the cloud. One of the biggest strains is that applications average 12 to 15 years in age, which poses the question: augment existing applications or build a new one on another platform? Gracely suggested businesses would consider leveraging AWS as a Platform-as-a-Service given that very question, but that it leaves room for innovation and choice.

Floyer was quick to remind that “any migration you don’t have to do, you want to avoid.” There’s a high cost and risk to changing platforms, and companies in the past have lost hundreds of millions in order to save just a few, he said.

Giving back

Open source has been the basis and beginning of a multitude of applications, and AWS is no different in benefitting from open source. But AWS hasn’t given back in the same way, according to theCUBE participants. Floyer thinks that this “shortsighted” approach will come back to bite AWS, and as Gracely pointed out, AWS could gain a great deal from the innovation that comes with making something open and accessible.

One of the biggest troubles is the memory of those migration costs – specifically as it relates to support for IT. Open source has provided a certain comfort for the enterprise consumer in that there’s no reliance on any one company to provide support, and in the past, those companies sometimes evaporated or required large investments to maintain, according to theCUBE discussion. It’ll be key to see how AWS presents its vision at this year’s AWS re:Invent 2015 event and how the Silicon Valley community reacts.

Watch the full segment below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Amazon re:Invent 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE