The lessons of history can be instructive in providing comparisons with the latest trends in cloud computing, even if it means looking back in time hundreds of millions of years. Scientists believe that in the Cambrian period 542 million years ago, there was an explosion of life forms that signaled the rise of a wide variety of more complex animals.

One tech industry executive sees parallels between this significant historical period and the transformation taking place in the enterprise cloud world today.

“That Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I’m moving from very a simple, single cloud, single use-case environment to a very complex, multicloud use-case environment,” said Steve Mullaney (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Aviatrix Systems Inc. “This is a takeoff of a movement, a multicloud, networking movement and community. We want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds and build their network architecture regardless of which public cloud they’re using.”

Mullaney spoke during the Altitude 2020 event in Santa Clara, California, which was livestreamed and hosted by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Threat to company survival

One of the lessons of history is that life forms of various species have come and gone over time. For many companies in the enterprise world, advanced technologies accompanying cloud adoption have created a highly competitive environment where business extinction can become a real possibility.

“It started from the CEOs and boards of enterprise customers when they said: ‘I have an existential threat to the survival of my company,’” Mullaney said. “If you look at every industry, who they’re worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise. What they’re worried about is the three-year-old enterprise that’s leveraging cloud, that’s leveraging artificial intelligence, and that’s where they feel that they’re actually going to get wiped out.”

The Aviatrix CEO also believes that this explosion of cloud has propelled the information-technology organization back into a position of significant importance.

“If you think back just a few years ago in cloud, the enterprise was led by DevOps; it was led by the applications,” Mullaney said. “Now with this Cambrian explosion, enterprises are getting very serious and mission critical. They care about visibility; they care about control; they care about compliance. IT is in charge, and that’s why we’re here today to discuss that.”

Here’s the video livestream of the full event, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Altitude event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner and co-producer for Altitude 2020. Neither Aviatrix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE