As the Structure conference enters its seventh year of production, one man has been involved with the show since the beginning. Derrick Harris of Mesosphere, Inc. sat down with George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Structure 2015 in San Francisco to talk about the conference’s evolution, as well as the emergence of new technologies and products.

Humble beginnings

The first Structure conference was quite different than the Structure conference of today. Much of the meat of what drives conferences like Structure 2015 today either didn’t exist or was just getting off the ground in the late 2000s. Harris lightheartedly remembered what the cloud infrastructure alternatives were at the time:

“They were VMware, and they were no sort of virtual edition layer at all,” said Harris. “I mean, those were the options.”

Where are they now?

Over the years of the Structure conference, many new technologies and products appeared that people were excited about at the time, and some considered them to be the “next big thing.” But in the years since, the excitement cooled, and those products never really went anywhere.

“The hybrid cloud, the private cloud, OpenStack. I mean when OpenStack came along people said, ‘Oh my god, we need this alternative to Amazon and VMware … this is gonna be it … and look at all these companies backing it,’” recalled Harris. “And then in time … well I don’t think we need to go into much detail. It hasn’t proven to be that panacea in most cases.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Structure 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE