This week in Seoul I learned a few important things.
1. OpenStack is driven by every major provider
The cloud has reached maturity and with it comes accelerating adoption. In fact, according to Gartner, public cloud services in the mature Asia Pacific (APAC) nations will reach $7.4 billion this year! It’s amazing to see that OpenStack is being deployed by every major provider in South Korea, like our friends at KT. We were the first storage company to join the OpenStack community, and seeing its adoption across the globe is both exciting and gratifying.
2. In a relationship-driven culture, service might matter more than the product itself
The industry has changed. As consumers and as businesses we no longer seek products, we want a great experience and often base our decision on the value of the ongoing services and relationships. Why would customers choose a service provider likes us over a more famous systems vendor? Because we need to earn our right to be a partner every day anew! Day in and day out we must deliver a flawless service to earn our keep, while the traditional vendor gets paid for a product up almost entirely front. The staggering growth in cloud services shows that relationships and services are where the real value lies.
3. Simultaneous interpreters are superhuman
There is no other explanation for it. Simultaneous interpreters must be superhuman – talk about parallelism and ultra-low latency! 감사합니다 (kamsahamnida, i.e., thanks) for your help this week and for making my presentation a great success. Thanks also to KT and to the great OpenStack community. See you in May in Vancouver.
