Andy Parham, CEO of Bick Group, delivered the keynote speech at Data Center World.

In short, he said that a tremendous number and extent of changes are coming to the data center segment. To emphasize his point, Parham used two examples. The first was alternating current’s takeover of the power market from direct current, carried out by Samuel Insull, an apprentice of Thomas Edison. The second was a clip from the movie “Poseidon,” showing the ship being hit by a giant rogue wave.

Parham listed five Cs to further analyze the smaller waves in the big wave:

1. Cost: The cost of all IT gears (servers, storage, and networking) is declining.
2. Consumption: Developing countries like China, India, Brazil, and Russia are starting to consume a lot of IT resources.
3. Convenience: Ease of use
4. Componential: Systems are increasingly constructed with smaller modularized standard components.
5. Cloud

According to Parham, these factors will change the data center market forever, and the time of incremental changes is over. He also stressed that a data center should be looked at as part of an executive business decision, not merely from a technology standpoint.

Parham then suggested doing the following:

1. Recognize cloud is a storm and not a shower.
2. Take a seat at the table (get ready).
3. Build a road map to the future. Don’t focus on technologies themselves but on what they make possible.

He concluded by saying that the endpoint is hard to see when a trend begins. According to him, there are a lot of discussions about the problems of cloud, such as SLA, security, and interoperability, and those will be resolved over time. After all, cloud contains a storm not a shower.

Parham is an excellent speaker and did a really good job in his speech, including the delivery and the points. I think some of his points are valid, but the impacts of his speech on facilities folks are more far-reaching than on IT folks, who have some idea of what cloud can and cannot do.

When a new paradigm like cloud is introduced, the whole game may change. I am yet to see how cloud computing changes all computing. Meanwhile, I am covering cloud computing in this blog.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Data Center World, SLA