Computation, storage and networking are being carried away by this massive wave. But rather than staring at it or ignoring it, Steve Mullaney (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Aviatrix Systems Inc, advises riding it. This massive wave is about to transform how the enterprise builds and consumes IT … for good. 

The success of the early adopters, which have been riding this wave for quite some time, has left some clues. Now, we see the majority — and even laggards — transitioning and moving to the cloud. Although data centers are still being built and will not die anytime soon, the new center of gravity will lean toward the cloud, according to Mullaney. Sure, we will still rely on on-premises infrastructure, but this time, it will be on the side of internet of things and edge computing — everything with the purpose of bringing on-prem closer to the cloud.  

“… This is a thousand-foot wave, and it’s 10 times bigger than what I saw in client-server,” Mullaney said. “It’s the biggest opportunity of value creation and innovation that I have ever seen and ever will see in my life. I think this year … got serious, like really serious, in terms of big enterprises coming in.”

Mullaney spoke with  John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed data being reborn in the cloud, transitioning versus transforming, multicloud, and consuming versus building. 

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: What Andy Jassy was talking about in his keynote today, that there are new kinds of companies, there are the ones born in the cloud, then there are enterprises reborning in the cloud. This is the new game, and if you’re not on that side of the street you could be out of business.  

Mullaney: The thing that really got me excited about a year ago was watching enterprises make that transition and say, “You know what, the center of gravity has gone from architectures inside the on-prem data center and now moved into the cloud.” So cloud 1.0 and 2.0 were really more about taking my architecture that was on-prem and pushing it into the cloud. So, the change that’s happened is now everybody realizes that the center of gravity is in the cloud. The architecture of the cloud now [is] actually pushing out and extending into on-premises.  

Furrier: Multicloud is a reality. What’s your vision, and how do you see the multicloud playing out as people start becoming more cloud operations-based?

Mullaney: So, first off, it’s the very beginning, early days. Second thing is, AWS has done incredibly well with the developers and the “born-in-the-cloud people,” [but with] enterprises, not so much. And, you know what? Microsoft understands enterprises. So I think we’re going to be set up for a little bit of battle here. And it’s, by no means, over. 

Furrier: [In the cloud] there’s a build-out level and then there’s a consumption level. So there’s having all that capability, but also the customer’s consumption has to be addressed, i.e., solutions packaging, ease of use. What’s your take on those two dynamics? 

Mullaney: The phrase “Go build” is great for an early adopter. You go tell that to an enterprise — here’s the power tools, go build your house — they’ll go … “I don’t want to go build anything, I want to consume.” So I think you’re going to see them [AWS] changing their tune a little bit, because the markets evolved. And I think it’s caught them a little bit by surprise as well. I think Microsoft because they know the enterprise, they won’t say, “Go build.” They’re going to say, “Come consume.” And I think that’s going to resonate with enterprises. 

Furrier: So you’ve got a lot of buzz in the analyst community around a phrase I’ve heard you say: “There’s no more food left in the data center, and the animals are leaving the data center.” So if there’s no food in the data center, what’s happening? What does that mean? 

Mullaney: The center of gravity has moved into the cloud; that’s where the food is. So you’re going to see a lot of cloud-naive legacy vendors put “cloud” on things. It’s the same crap they had; they’re just going to put “cloud” on it. Because like I said, what do animals do when they run out of food? They go find where the food is, right? 

I know that data centers aren’t going away, but they’re going to get quarantined as mainframes got quarantined. It’s going to be an expense area; it’s not going to be an investment. And what do you do with an expense? You quarantine it, you cap it, you hopefully keep it flat, or you reduce it. 

Furrier: What’s your view of the startup landscape? If you’re advising startups to go at this market … how do they attack the marketplace? 

Mullaney: First thing, you’ve got to be cloud-native. You have got to understand the basic native constructs of Azure, Google, AWS … because of all of the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, you want to use that. You don’t want to have to go recreate that. And then number two, I think there’s a lot of opportunity in the cloud. Everybody thinks AWS will do anything and everything you need in networking. But there are so many limitations that they have for enterprises. 

I would say where the interesting thing happens is in the interface between on-prem and cloud. There’s still going to be an interface. That interface is where a lot of the complexity and friction come, so whether it’s IoT, edge computing, or the things that we do for bringing that cloud in a seamless, simple, and automated way, [it’s about] bringing the on-prem into the cloud world in a very seamless way. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE