"There are back-office batch processes written in COBOL that work fine. And, there are apps written for client/server that will continue running great in a virtualized environment," stated Troy Angrignon, Vice President, Sales & Partnering at Cloudscaling, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Angrignon concluded, "Re-engineering them for cloud won't happen for the foreseeable future."

Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?

Troy Angrignon: Sure. But, it's harder than you might realize. Making money from Big Data starts with data, but you need a business model, developers who get devops, and a cloud infrastructure built for agility and economy.

Cloud Computing Journal: Forrester's James Staten: "Not everything will move to the cloud as there are many business processes, data sets and workflows that require specific hardware or proprietary solutions that can't take advantage of cloud economics. For this reason we'll likely still have mainframes 20 years from now." Agree or disagree?

Angrignon: Absolutely. There are back-office batch processes written in COBOL that work fine. And, there are apps written for client/server that will continue running great in a virtualized environment. Re-engineering them for cloud won't happen for the foreseeable future.

Cloud Computing Journal: The price of cloud computing will go up - so will the demand. Agree or disagree or....?

Angrignon: Prices are coming down and demand is going up. We've seen this movie before.

Cloud Computing Journal: Rackspace is reporting an 80% growth from cloud computing, Amazon continues to innovate and make great strides, and Microsoft, Dell and other big players are positioning themselves as big leaders. Are you expecting in the next 18 months to see the bottom fall out and scores of cloud providers failing or getting gobbled up by bigger players? Or what?

Angrignon: Hard to tell if we're close to a consolidation yet. We're still in the early innings of this game.

Cloud Computing Journal: Please name one thing that - despite what we all may have heard or read - you are certain is NOT going to happen in the future, with Cloud and BigData? ;-)

Angrignon: One thing we're hearing a lot about is the dominant role that major, branded hardware providers are playing in the cloud. Long term, that won't be the case. Rather, enterprises will embrace non-OEM hardware and Taiwanese ODMs like Quanta and Super Micro are going to earn big market share gains at the expense of established datacenter players.