GRANDVILLE – Napier, CEO of the $780 million hosting company Rackspace, spoke with Techonomy’s Adam Ludwig about the present and future of cloud computing.
What?s so compelling about cloud technology?
When I was a kid, my first computer was an Apple I. Every application ran locally. Now, with broadband, you can deliver exponentially more computing power and run exponentially more apps. The scale of the capabilities is what makes cloud computing compelling.
Cloud is an adrenaline shot for this age because it creates so much access and choice for customers. It used to be that businesses bought the software and servers, hired all the IT people, and ran it all themselves. With cloud it?s about service at a cheap price that you can access from anywhere when you need it. Manufacturing plants used to make their own electricity, but now of course they buy it from utilities. Data and software are going in the same direction with the cloud. With computing as a service, the pace of change can move at Web speed. Our customers have software they want to run in the cloud, and we enable that for them. We take responsibility for the infrastructure environment for their applications.
To read the rest of this interview, click on Forbes.Com
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