Ozzie said that the future for companies’ data hosting will be in a combination of cloud computing and on-premise data centers. In his words, “at some point in time, every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud…”

We couldn’t agree more. Our vision is that in the future, every company will have some kind of environment in the cloud. As Daniel Lyons of Newsweek recently said, “People are going to be putting their information not into some device but into some service that lives in the sky.” Lyon added, “Pretty much everyone in the tech industry agrees it’s the future.” For companies, cloud computing makes a lot of sense because it’s cheaper: in some cases, it cuts a company’s costs in half.

Of course, organizations that move to the cloud will need tools to help them deploy and manage their cloud applications.

The layer IT will need to handle in the future is the Application layer: deploying, managing, maintaining and troubleshooting applications in the cloud. Existing automation tools are old and fit traditional data centers. They are system- and infrastructure- centric solutions, while there should be a shift to application-centric solutions that will enable effective and efficient automation.

Nolio is a vendor leading the charge on doing just that. As an innovator of Application Service Automation solutions for physical, virtual and cloud data centers, Nolio’s Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the deployment of applications in the cloud and for the management of application change.