John Furrier speaking with "@krishnan," of Rishidot Research at Intel Developer Forum, 2012. While covering IDF 2012 John Furrier stopped to talk with Krishnan Subramanian, CEO and founder of Rishidot Research. Rishidot is a new research firm that focuses on datacenter convergence and the consumerization of IT. Subramanian, or "@Krish" as he is also known, talks about mobility, future apps, P2P clouds and datacenters in the expanding IT world. Krish, who comes from the enterprise side, believes the mobility trend in enterprise is just starting. There are lots of innovations coming that will change the interface landscape completely from what we are seeing today. Mobile computing is not just about mobility, it's also about computing. That's the key going forward. "As we move more into the Big Data world our idea of cloud is going to change from a more centralized one to a more distributed one... more like a P2P cloud." Krish follows up, elaborating on how he expects things to change in reaction to IT growth. As we go by Krish believes end user computing and datacenter computing will merge making them very tough to differentiate. While this may not happen in the next 2-5 years, eventually every mobile device you carry might become a node in the cloud. Imagine the cloud as something centralized such as Google, or Amazon. Because all this data must be brought back to the centralized cloud network latency becomes the new issue. That is a problem that does not appear to be going away any time soon. In addition, not everyone may want an Amazon type of cloud. For various reasons, some people may require high performance clouds. When these kinds of needs merge together we will move from a handful of cloud providers to a broader distributional range. When on the subject of Personal clouds, does the automation on the cloud side come first, Furrier asked citing the similarity to VMworld. He then probes further for Krish's take on cloud migration. Krish believes that we should figure out the automation portion first. The entire user experience will break down if we move to P2P cloud. First we need a more federated cloud ecosystem where the main player offers services based on the needs of the niche users they support. Once we figure out the extract away the complexity that comes with a federated cloud eco system, then we can start delving into P2P clouds. The notion of software infrastructure as the future of the datacenter is an idea being tossed around at the conference. Now that software is being viewed as such Furrier wanted to know how important software will be according to "@Krish". While hardware is important and there are advancements being made therein, its software that is going to give control to the end user. If we are intending to more forward in a data driven world then software is the area where innovation needs to happen. "Software defined datacenters is the first step being taken by VMware to compete in an ocean of services," says Krish. The conversation shifted to clouds and the "Cold War of Cloud" as Furrier calls it, Krish spoke about the budding cloud market and interoperability. "Interoperability will be a problem for a bit more time to come," Krish admits. We are starting to see a lot more choices in cloud posturing into the marketplace. While interoperability will be key, it will happen at a layer above the infrastructure. Right now however, Krish states he will be pushing against the standardization effort. Krish believes that the focus should be on innovation at the moment. Now is a time for the market to blossom and grow and standardization reserved for a bit later once the system has had some time to mature. Both Furrier and Krishnan are looking forward to Open stack becoming much more developer centric.