Today we announced an eCloud Summit to take place in Austin about a month from now. The event will bring together a few hundred top execs across three key constituencies with a big stake in the emerging “enterprise cloud”: Global Enterprises, Service Providers, and Enabling Technologies. There are plenty of cloud conferences focused on the plumbing of this change, of course, but we couldn’t find one built for top execs. So we built it.
Attendees joining our global management team will include key executives from Arista Networks, Chiquita Brands, Citigroup, Citrix, Fujitsu, HCL, Honda, IBM, Nasdaq, Panasonic, RBC, Softlayer, Sungard, and Yahoo!. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome them all to the brand new JW Marriott in Austin on February 17-18 for a couple days of provocative and practical discussion, not to mention an outdoor pig roast and some great live music on the night of the 17th (the event is invitation-only, but if you’d like one please contact us here.)
So why are the “Copy Data Virtualization” guys doing this?
Well, copy data virtualization does more than solve your copy data problem. It’s a means to an end… a way to break free from the constraints your infrastructure puts on your data at every stage of its lifecycle. Copy data virtualization is about improving the resiliency of your business in response to challenges, its agility in the face of opportunities, and its mobility in taking advantage of the next generation of enterprise technology, which will live largely in the cloud.
It’s pretty clear now enterprise IT is moving aggressively toward a cloud delivery model. According to 451 Research 65% of large scale enterprises now use some form of cloud computing.* According to Gartner, SaaS will become the dominant model for consuming application functionality for approximately 80% of all organizations by 2018.**
Aggregate statistics like these mask a complicated reality inside the enterprise. Most wrestle with a tangle of infrastructure they increasingly see as a commodity, even as the applications that infrastructure supports become more strategic. All look for ways to improve the resiliency, agility, and control of the data that is the lifeblood of their business while reducing the cost, time, and complexity necessary to manage it.
It’s in this context that private, public, and hybrid cloud delivery models are gaining favor. The move toward the cloud isn’t so much an event as a process, a progression of individual applications across infrastructure types with relative strengths and weaknesses.
A continuum has emerged, from the data center to the public cloud. Every enterprise application lives today in a position within the bands of this continuum, and each has a position, often elsewhere, where it would live in a fully optimized state. While the particulars will differ, the movement of application data across this continuum will challenge every enterprise in the years to come. Change is the only constant among those seeking the efficiency, scalability, and convenience of the cloud.
Orchestrating that change will demand a new data management model that’s infrastructure-agnostic and application-centric. It will take a new generation of technology that virtualizes data just as we’ve virtualized compute and networks. It will require a new approach to managing the complete range of enterprise use cases, optimized for the full lifecycle of far-flung copies, and not just the daily torrent of production originals.
It will require Copy Data Virtualization. It will require Actifio.
Enterprise IT is dead, folks. Long live the enterprise cloud.
*Research report for Verizon, 451 Research, May 2014
**Gartner Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2014 Update, Ed Anderson, September 9, 2014