HPE, Microsoft Predict The Future For Channel Partners In Cloud

During a recent roundtable with CRN, executives at leading cloud vendors provided insights into where the future opportunities lie for their channel partners.

Bobby Patrick, chief marketing officer for HPE Cloud, said the company sees an increasing focus on the private cloud space, which could grow to be an estimated $200 billion arena in the next two years.

"Our research shows that 74 percent of the workload in the next two years is going to private clouds," Patrick said.

Microsoft Vice President Phil Sorgen pointed out the growing ecosystem around the Internet of Things as an opportunity for Azure capabilities.

"We're going to see an explosion in IoT," he said. "And then IoT has a specific byproduct of that, it's just going to even more rapidly grow the amount of data created, the mountains of data that companies are going to accumulate."

Sorgen asserted that Azure capabilities give users "the ability to actually process that much data and turn it into insights, which is going to only fuel further the need for visualization of that data, so that it's not just the data scientists that can understand [it]."