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Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Sinclair, and I'm joined by my colleague, Mark Bowker. And we're talking about a new research study focused on distributed cloud. Mark, what is a distributed cloud?

Mark: Yeah, no, it gets asked a lot, right? We've been thinking about this for a while and thinking about the research and the whole idea, Scott, is we, you know, no longer believe that things are just going to be all this cloud-native, born in the cloud 100%. And we also don't believe everything is going to be just inside the data center. There's going to be a mix of both along with edge type of computing, leveraging telco infrastructure, leverage even industry cloud.

So, this whole idea is that distributed cloud is a digital ecosystem that connects all these pieces to really create a developer-ready infrastructure for modern applications.

Scott: You know, we use the term hybrid cloud a lot, we use the term multicloud a lot, and then people use them interchangeably and they don't really know what they mean. And I think one of the big questions that I tend to run into is questions around data movement, app movement, where are they going? Where are they coming from? What's moving? Is this something that you expect to cover in the study?

Mark: It's a large part of it, right? And it's not even just the movement, it can be the decoupling of it, right? So, if somebody is looking at...we saw this with virtualization, you know, is somebody decoupling the data from the virtual machine or the compute from the storage? What about now looking at new things like containers, right? Containers at scale, what does that mean whether it be a stateful or stateless type of application, and how are they planning on that data?

And then it comes down to one of the biggest things we have is people are trying to absorb that innovation of the cloud, Scott, by dealing with data center reality, and that data center reality may be the data, but it shouldn't stop them from absorbing that cloud service. So, things will certainly look up.

Scott: Where do you see the future of the data center going? Is the data center really just the new edge? Are people getting out of the data center game? Or is the data center here and it's going to be as strong as ever?

Mark: Oh, the lights are being shut off. No question. I mean, the answer is sure, we see that happening, but I joke, right? Very rare does somebody, you know, shut the lights off in the data center and really think about moving all their investment they've had in IT, business applications, process, resources, skillset, people, and just moving that to some type of external, you know, hyperscaler, for example.

And I think they're here for the future. I don't think people are running out and building new data centers as frequently as they were before. They are looking at cloud services for things like data kind of continuity, business continuity, those types of things. So, we'll continue to see that, but I think people are still going to have an investment inside their data center for years to come, which guess what? We'll be following that for years to come as well.

Scott: Makes total sense. So, Mark, last question. If people want to sponsor this survey, be part of it, who should they talk to, who should they reach out to at ESG?

Mark: Yeah. I mean, reach out to Scott and I, we're both can talk to you about the survey, right, distributed cloud kind of research series. We're just kicking it off here in June and ultimately going to run it for really the next 12 to 18 months. And different pieces focus on really what's the center of gravity for applications, looks at how people are ultimately kind of managing that distributed cloud. And then really towards the end of the year, we reach out a little bit further and look at the edge, right?

What's happening at the edge, what are some drivers there, and what's that really mean to businesses?

Scott: I think the insights are going to be groundbreaking. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for watching.

Mark: Thanks, Scott.