Van den Bedem said most customers he interacts with are doing just that: migrating applications to a public cloud environment for the long haul.
“They don’t want to be in the business of managing their own data centers anymore,” he said. “It's operationally complex. They want to do a data center exit.”
There are various reasons for the egress. Some enterprises are embarking on a multi-year strategy to modernize their applications. Going cloud-native allows them to meet key business goals, including scalability, increased uptime, and cost efficiency by way of turning IT operations into an operating expense.
Another factor is rising complexity. He said an aftereffect of the connectivity explosion is that some organizations have accumulated a hard-to-manage mix of technologies across data centers. Migration provides a path to standardized operations.
“The beauty of running Nutanix’s NC2 solution on Azure is that it reduces complexity,” he said. “All the issues…are worked out in the backend.”
While he occasionally encounters an enterprise swimming crosscurrent, that is, from cloud platforms back to on-premises operations, it is a fringe case, usually due to hasty decision-making.
“There's a level of skill that you need to have to operate in a hyperscaler correctly,” he said. “Knowing the laws of the land (regulatory issues), the laws of physics (latency issues), and the laws of economics (service fees) is very, very important before starting out.”
Running AI Workloads on Azure from a Nutanix Hypervisor
Working in Microsoft’s Cloud, an AI division, van den Bedem is always thinking about emerging technologies and how they dovetail, and sometimes collide, with cloud platforms. He believes AI will be transformative, comparing its recent maturation to the invention of the electronic calculator or the introduction of the PC.
“If people don't adopt these new AI tools, they are going to be left behind,” he said candidly.
“In 10-years time, most people around the globe will be using some form of AI-based assistance to do their jobs,” he said, making an analogy to how software has eradicated the use of handwritten ledgers for accounting purposes.