Today I’m going to talk a little bit
about what I like to refer to as the developer era.
Cloud computing is a underlying infrastructure,
like client-server computing was 
or mainframe computing in the sixties.
In the mainframe world the infrastructure was all locked up
and it was a privileged asset that very few people could get to.
When we moved into the client-server world 
you had software engineers writing applications
and the server was kind of close to where they were.
Cloud computing is this third revolution of computing.
It’s a different way of doing infrastructure.
Some of the things that cloud computing brings
– agility, transformation capability, 
massive ability to scale out or scale back
– allows developers to build things 
really quickly and deploy them really quickly.
So in a very large business setting 
what you’re seeing in the developer era
is the shift of responsibility 
from an IT operations organization
really to the developer community that’s building it.
So the responsibility of both 
building the application and deploying it
and operating it is now all run by the same small group of people.
Customers come and talk about their infrastructure.
‘˜I have racks of this, and storage that looks like this.’
But very rapidly the dialogue comes to ‘˜I have 8000 apps,
I need to move them to here.
It’s costing me this much 
to take care of all of my applications.’
At the end of the day companies have infrastructure,
but they run applications on top of that infrastructure.
So, in many ways, 
the applications have become the enterprise.
The companies that can most rapidly modify what they offer
to the consumers, 
that are topical and current and correct, win.
It’s about retaining customers and retaining revenue.
And we’re really at this stage where 
those are the things that define you.
It’s not how good the kitchen is, right,
the stoves and the pots and the pans,
it’s what you actually build and cook 
in that kitchen that defines the restaurant.
This era right now makes it really interesting to do computing.
The types of things that we’re doing with technology
and the things that cloud computing 
allows application developers to build
– we haven’t been able to pursue before.
