"We'll continue to see the long tail of legacy technology in use for years," observed Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Donaghy continued, "New applications are being written today that are much more efficient, fast and cost-effective that take advantage of advancements in massive processing and scale out infrastructure."

Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?

Brian Patrick Donaghy: It's the difference between wisdom and knowledge. Collecting, maintaining, and accessing large datasets is the prerequisite to then running analytical processes - or extracting the wisdom from the knowledge. Asking the right questions is the trick.

Cloud Computing Journal: Forrester's James Staten: "Not everything will move to the cloud as there are many business processes, data sets and workflows that require specific hardware or proprietary solutions that can't take advantage of cloud economics. For this reason we'll likely still have mainframes 20 years from now." Agree or disagree?

Donaghy: The reason we have 20-year-old mainframes and other legacy systems in production today is more related to the applications that were written for those systems. Applications that are working well on legacy platforms are difficult to migrate from an ROI perspective. We'll continue to see the long tail of legacy technology in use for years. New applications are being written today that are much more efficient, fast and cost-effective that take advantage of advancements in massive processing and scale out infrastructure.

Cloud Computing Journal: The price of cloud computing will go up - so will the demand. Agree or disagree or....?

Donaghy: Useful technology advancements always produce a rise in demand with a fall in pricing - cloud computing will follow this same trend. We are watching worldwide demand grow for utility grade computing resources that can be bought on-demand, as a service. However, we are still in the early stages of the adoption curve. We believe that there will be a commodity computing market with stiff competition and low prices; but also a specialized, enterprise and industry-specific sector meeting complex demands. Market pricing is relative to the complexity of the problem you are solving.

Cloud Computing Journal: Rackspace is reporting an 80% growth from cloud computing, Amazon continues to innovate and make great strides, and Microsoft, Dell and other big players are positioning themselves as big leaders. Are you expecting in the next 18 months to see the bottom fall out and scores of cloud providers failing or getting gobbled up by bigger players? Or what?

Donaghy: Expansion and consolidation periods happen during technology shifts and cloud is no exception. We have definitely seen a large expansion of the number of service providers over the last year and not all of them will get it right; some will find the right niche and mix and grow into being a major player themselves, while others will be consolidated or acquired. CRM software took the same path 10 years ago as SaaS took hold. At the time there were a very large number of CRM providers that got consolidated into the handful there are today. Much of the driving reason behind consolidation in CRM is standardization. We are already experiencing the standardization consolidation in cloud with the orchestration race, which I believe will end up with an AWS-platform, OpenStack and CloudStack standards.

Cloud Computing Journal: Please name one thing that - despite what we all may have heard or read - you are certain is NOT going to happen in the future, with Cloud and BigData? ;-)

Donaghy: We are not going to see a complete move of processing and systems to major cloud service providers. I believe we will see more local cloud networks, internal private cloud, and standardized service providers servicing their local regions - on par with the way that local telecommunications companies work.