The first shift toward public cloud services has made a rich yet extremely complicated digital disruption in the technological industry, and traditional IT services are dead — at least that’s the view of Prashanth Chandrasekar (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Rackspace Inc, which claims to have the industry’s broadest portfolio of applications, data, security and infrastructure services for helping businesses with Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud engagements.

“We believe the world of traditional IT services of large monolithic contracts … I think those days are effectively gone,” Chandrasekar said. “They’re dead.” So businesses must be met where they are on their digital transformation journey, he added.

Chandrasekar spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Susannah Streeter (@StreeterNews), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit in London. They discussed the shifts happening in cloud technology and how service providers need to rise to the challenge (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Navigating 1,600 new features a year on AWS

So what’s coming in the future of public cloud? The next generation of cloud services — which will be foundational moving forward — is a very utility-based model of services to help meet customers exactly where they are their own journey, according to Chandrasekar.

“From our perspective, customers are on this journey from one platform to another. They’re moving from traditional IT workloads to the public cloud. We just have to say, ‘Listen, what do customers want to work on?’ based on their various factors that they take into consideration,” he said.

With this shift to cloud comes the need to partner with customers in their navigation of the constant additions and changes to tools that AWS is making available, according to Chandrasekar. There are an average of 1,600 features being launched by AWS on a yearly basis — and while cloud-first companies or new startups are leveraging these features out of the gate, this new world requires companies like Rackspace to help older companies navigate through this very complicated scene.

“There’s a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption, trying to compete with these startups, that need a lot of help to re-skill their workforce, to change the way they think about process within their organizations, between their business, development, technology, and operations teams,” Chandrasekar concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit London event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Summit London 2019 event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE