This week, I attended the Gartner Data Center Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference. There are a lot of great reasons to go to a conference like this. It’s good to network with peers and see the latest vendor technologies in-action. The reason I went is because I wanted to look into the future. One of the key roles I play as a technology leader is to see the future, then prepare my organization and the company at-large for what’s coming next. I live-tweeted the conference. To see the highlights, check out my twitter feed at @mr_zach_hughes.

One of the stark realities we face at CHS is technical debt. This puts us in the position of feeling like we need to spend all of our energy catching-up to today, with little left to put toward looking to the future. While this is certainly true, we shouldn’t get down on ourselves to the point of believing that we are alone or behind the pack of similar enterprise organizations. The challenges we face are common everywhere. The trick is to take care of the legacy technology and enable the future at the same time. Waiting until we are “caught up” isn’t an option. Frankly, the satisfaction of being “caught up” isn’t ever going to happen. Additionally, if I let that happen, I’m not doing my job. I intend to continually and unceasingly propel our technology capabilities into the ever-elusive future.

In the year 2016, it isn’t glamorous to be an Infrastructure & Operations professional. Some say the public cloud will render our profession obsolete. Some look at initiatives like DevOps as essentially “Dev without Ops.” I don’t look at it that way. While I completely agree that trends like these will considerably transform our work, there will always be a need for infrastructure technologists that can build platform capabilities in the enterprise. There will always been a need for operationally-minded professionals to defend our technology assets from continuity and cyber threats. There will always be a need for technologists with one foot in the business and one foot in the technology market to bridge the gap and integrate everything together.

So, what does the future hold? One of the most fascinating presentations at the Gartner conference was by technology venture capitalist, Peter Levine. In enterprise technology, we generally look at ourselves as behind the times, and we look to the major vendor marketplace for what is current. It makes a ton of sense to look to a venture capitalist to see what the future holds. After all, venture capitalists invest in emerging markets, with companies that no one has heard of, that won’t have a shippable product for the next 5 years. Where that money is going now, gives us some clue as to where to look going forward. One of the most provocative things Peter said was, “cloud is going away.” He said similar things about mobile and big data. It’s not that these things are truly going to disappear or stop being valuable, but they are mature and uninvestable from a venture capital standpoint. Peter explained that we are always on a pendulum swinging from centralized computing to distributed computing, back and forth. Cloud represents the swing toward centralization. That’s almost over. What’s next is the new distributed computing at the edge in the form of the Internet of Things.

Another major topic at the conference was enterprise workload hosting. It’s a fact that on-premises Data Centers in office buildings are disappearing rapidly. There’s an assumption that all of those workloads are moving to the public cloud in AWS or Azure. While that segment is growing very rapidly, at equal pace is the growth of off-premises private cloud Data Centers in co-location facilities. It turns out that new, cloud-native apps are going to the public cloud, but mature apps are moving to co-location facilities. This validates the CHS Data Center strategy, and actually shows that we are ahead of the game. Gartner predicted that off-premises Data Centers and public cloud workloads won’t surpass on-premises Data Centers until 2021. Just this week, CHS and OneNeck published our joint success story about how we partnered to build one of our new off-premises Data Centers in Eden Prairie.

The future is bright for infrastructure technology. We have clouds to build and things that need to be internetworked and managed. Data under our stewardship will continue to explode and will continue to require our care and protection. The world economy is on the precipice of the digital industrial revolution, and we have the responsibility to do the foundational work to make it happen in our business.

Thoughts on what the future holds? Let’s talk about them here. Please comment below and share this article with your colleagues.