John Considine recently took the stage at Interop in New York to unveil the new Verizon Cloud – consisting of our new Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, Verizon Cloud Compute, and cloud-based object storage service, Verizon Cloud Storage. We caught up with John to ask him about Verizon’s vision behind the new offering and what the future holds for enterprises wanting to leverage the benefits of cloud.
- What’s the vision behind the new Verizon Cloud?
Verizon Cloud is the next step in our cloud evolution. It comes from more than five years operating Enterprise Cloud, developing best practices, and having continued conversations with key enterprise and government agencies about what they need from a cloud platform. We realized we needed to develop a platform from the ground–up to help organizations realize the true power of cloud. The services are built on a new architecture that lets us deliver the performance, flexibility, and scale that our customers need to get their work done in the cloud.
- Is Verizon Cloud targeted specifically to enterprise-size organizations?
Verizon Cloud targets organizations of all sizes that want to get work done on the cloud and leverage its unique performance control features. Our expertise is centered on the enterprise and the cloud is a part of the continuum of services we offer from networking, to security, to colocation. Verizon Cloud will be deployed in world-class data centers and we have built-in capabilities to maintain high levels of availability and reliability of the services in addition to unique hardware architecture that has allowed us to build a strong platform with redundant features all around.
- You have been quoted by the media saying that Verizon Cloud is a revolutionary offering. How do you see Verizon Cloud impacting the cloud landscape today?
Verizon Cloud is changing everything. Verizon Cloud allows for the provisioning and deployment of virtual machines in minutes and the assignment of predictable performance levels for each machine. This enables mission critical applications to perform consistently and predictably. Other public clouds simply don’t offer performance control at the VM level. Over the next few months—and continuing throughout 2014—Verizon will unveil new features, geographic reach, security and certifications, customers, and strategic vendors for Verizon Cloud.
- How do you see the IT industry evolving in the next five years?
I foresee the IT industry continuing its transformation as the cloud market matures. Through this process, IT organizations will shift their focus and move away from undifferentiating tasks, including equipment ordering, management, and monitoring. In exchange, I expect increased attention on application performance management, disaster tolerance, highly available architectures, and operations in hybrid environments.
- As we get close to year-end, what IT trends do you see emerging in 2014?
I see two trends gaining momentum in 2014. The first one centers on Big Data. I see Big Data analytics becoming ubiquitous and having an ever-increasing role in business decisions across sectors. Every company and nearly every decision will be “data driven.” The second trend revolves around consumerization’s continued growth as a result of cloud and mobility. Businesses will continue to feel pressure to adopt technologies, tools, and interfaces that mirror what employees use on their own. Companies will need to keep pace with the technologies and applications people are used to accessing on their own.
PR Archives: Latest, By Company, By Date