There will be new computing over the challenges in the cloud, faster digital change, says Dheeraj Pandey

Dheeraj Pandey, who stepped down from his role as co-founder and chief executive officer of Nutanix Inc last year after an 11-year run building the company to become a key player in the integration of compute, storage and networking. His departure comes at a time when the computer industry is transitioning through yet another shrink cycle.

With cloud in the last three to four years, and what will happen in this coming decade, we’re going to make it even smaller,” Pandey said. “We’re creating a proliferation of clouds, there is a sprawl, a massive sprawl of cost centers, so we need yet another layer of software for governance to rein in that chaos.

Hence there is the need for a new HCI, a ‘hybrid cloud infrastructure. In an ironic twist to the history of innovation, as the technology has gotten smaller, companies providing the key platforms have gotten bigger.

Going forward, there is big challenges for big tech companies, as the technology has gotten smaller, companies providing the key platforms have gotten bigger. The three largest public cloud platforms - Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google -are also now three of the largest companies in the world.

“If you go back to the 1990s, IBM was big, Microsoft was big, AT&T was big, there’s always been big companies,” Pandey noted. “The way that Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative, with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. For others, decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder.”

Staying competitive will likely require an acceptance that the hybrid cloud will be the platform of choice among enterprise customers for the foreseeable future. Just this month, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index for Financial Services documented that 86% of polled information technology decision makers viewed hybrid cloud as their preferred model.