As the $148 billion cloud market continues to grow at a rate of 25 percent annually, the open-source community can take much responsibility for the adoption and innovation driving businesses to go all in on the cloud, according to Krish Subramanian (pictured), founder and principal analyst at Rishidot Research LLC.

“I would even go one step further and say open source is completely disrupting the traditional enterprise software in modern business,” Subramanian said.

According to one survey that included 3,400 business participants, 55 percent of respondents employ open source for infrastructure, and 65 percent said open source helps them to speed application development.

Subramanian spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco. The trio analyzed the event and Cisco Systems Inc.’s involvement with the development community. (* Disclosure below.)

 The week Krish Subramanian is theCUBE’s Guest of the Week.

An open playing field

Referring to Cisco’s cloud game plan, Subramanian feels that the networking company didn’t rush into the market trying to compete with Amazon Web Services Inc. By waiting for the right moment, and beginning with its InterCloud Fabric — which helps organizations build secure hybrid clouds — he believes that Cisco will go further. In fact, the company is in a good position to handle the Internet of Things, he added.

“And with the increasing focus on developers, they are going to capture the minds of developers. Especially for IoT; that is critical for Cisco. With the emphasis on programmability, Cisco is taking right steps toward capturing developer attention; they will be able to get there,” Subramanian said.

IoT remains in its infancy, and the evolution is still unraveling. Cisco is very persistent, and by acquiring AppDynamics Inc., it is telling the world that it understands that applications are the future and developers need the proper resources to develop apps on Cisco’s infrastructure, Subramanian pointed out. If data is the new currency, the data-defined infrastructure is what fuels the economy, he added.

Subramanian, Furrier and Burris also spoke about how data is defining infrastructure and applications. Subramanian explained how the “on-the-fly” infrastructure needs modifications to support data.

“I fully agree with the role of data and how, through the application, it influences how we deal with infrastructure. It does change completely,” he said.

Containers made cloud-native a household term

Docker and Kubernetes represent some of the larger container projects that are helping developers to standardize the packaging and deployment of code. Containers make it easy for developers to develop cloud-native apps and take advantage of the more distributed nature needed in the underlying infrastructure, according to Subramanian.

“Also, people are slowly realizing that as more and more enterprises go to the cloud, they are realizing that going with a single cloud provider may not solve all their problems. … But, they want a single pane of glass to manage everything,” he stated.

Regarding organizational transformation, Subramanian considers the approach of the CEO or CXO needs to be technology driven and not solely focused on their core business.

“And that mindset change needs a push from the top that’s going to accelerate the change down the lane. And I think the executive should think of [themselves as] a technology company, rather than a manufacturing company,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE