Future technologies

Nirmal Mehta: Part of my job is to look at future technologies, and nowadays I'm doing that for the cloud. At a certain point, it really hit me hard about the cloud.

Let me tell you. It was when I saw a slide at AWS re:Invent; it was just a bar chart, and on the x-axis was 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014—the years; and on the y-axis, it wasn't new services, but instead it was the year-over-year percentage increase in features that AWS will provide. The first year on that chart, it was 50%. They added another 50%, so the next one was 100%. Then it was 500%. The following one was 1,000%, and after that, it was 4,000%.

If you're an internal IT organization and you're building services, and you see that graph, and I'm selling the cloud and the ability to use cloud services to compose and build your own applications, how do you resist?

It's pretty clear to me that Amazon, Azure, and Google are making their way vertically. They...