Cloud7 is gathering opinions of the important names in cloud computing, web hosting, cybersecurity, data center, Linux, and other industries for 2022 in the Cloud7 Expert Series. Alongside their evaluations of 2022, they will share their expectations for the next year, 2023.
Caswell is well-known for accelerating the adoption of new technologies by enterprise customers. He has extensive leadership experience in the storage, flash, and virtualization markets including past executive roles at NetApp, Fusion-IO, and Adaptec.
He started his career at GE Corporate Consulting and holds a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and a master’s of business administration degree from Dartmouth College. He comes to Nutanix from VMware where he was VP of Product Marketing of the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group. Caswell is a New York native and has lived in northern California for many years. He and his wife Melissa live in Palo Alto and have two children. In his spare time, Lee enjoys cycling, playing guitar, and hiking the local hills.
Cloud economics are dramatically changing
As businesses are facing new pressures around IT spending, many are realizing that they can’t move their applications as fast or as cost-effectively as they originally thought to the cloud. It takes a lot of valuable time and top talent to redo applications that are already running on-prem in the cloud. What won’t change in the years to come is that getting to the cloud is strategically important. But businesses will increasingly become more strategic about which workloads belong in the cloud and which belong in private cloud environments and will prioritize solutions that offer multi-cloud portability across all environments.
We’re seeing a fundamental shift in IT purchasing decisions in Europe place a greater emphasis on how technology will lower energy costs and will enable the achievement of sustainability mandates. We are already seeing sustainability jump to the forefront as a buying criteria in Europe and expect to see this advance across the globe following the COP27 meeting.
Consolidation of developer environments will take hold
The reason for consolidation of developer environments is operations optimization. Customers would like the ability to run development environments where they make the most sense for the business while having the flexibility to pivot and move without fear of lock-in to a single infrastructure provider. As Kubernetes and the underlying infrastructure has standardized, so too will the upper layers of the stack leading to significant optimization and seamless operations and upgrades.
Untethered edge operating models will become more prevalent
In today’s world, it’s become expected that applications have to run all the time. Whether they’re connected or not means that the edge, by definition, will have to have an untethered operating model that’s not supported by closed-out models. IT organizations that valued server-based infrastructure to easily scale up and support mixed workloads will quickly find out that the same software-defined approach suits the edge by scaling down easily, operating while connected or unconnected to a central cloud, and by introducing a fleet management approach that spans from the edge to the data centre to the public cloud with consistent cloud management.