CEO Raghu Raghuram with IDC President Crawford Del Prete

You’re going to put your apps in different cloud instances. So, it’s the ability to manage applications across these clouds, manage your data across these clouds, manage multiple cloud instances. This is going to be something we’re going to be spending a lot of review film time talking about.

Raghuram: So app interdependency is a key theme. Multi-cloud is a theme. And distributed data is a key theme. And another part is the distributed workforce, as well. So, where do you think we go from here with respect to distributed work?

Del Prete: I think that this idea of working from anywhere, this idea of being able to work in any instance is really very much the future. I think that work will be different, but it will also be oddly familiar in the future. I think what’s really going to change here is the extent that we can apply automation to tasks that people aren’t necessarily excited about doing. And the key here is to automate the mundane, and a future workforce needs to take on more sophisticated things. And I think we’re going to be talking a lot about this in the future.

Raghuram: I think the combination of remote workforces and remote “everything” means that it’s an explosion of concerns around security, right? Where do you see that going?

Del Prete: Let’s be very blunt about it. In security, the customer has been forced to be the systems integrator too much of the time. And when the customer is forced to be the systems integrator, they make mistakes, because they really don’t understand it. And that complexity is exponentially growing with things like IoT and the distributed edge. So, I think there’s a real opportunity for suppliers and integrators to come in and try to create a simplification layer in what’s going to become a more and more distributed landscape. And frankly, we see this becoming more of a problem now than it was even a year ago.