Cloudera’s Kirk Dunn: The Data Center Is Sexy, Not Mobile

The data center is what’s sexy, not the mobile device. That’s what Kirk Dunn of Cloudera had to say on stage this morning at Disrupt 2012.

That is such an enterprise perspective but it is true in many respects. And it served as a major theme for a panel discussion on “How Enterprise Got Sexy,” with Dunn, Aaron Levie of Box; Todd McKinnon of Okta and Justin Rosenstein.

It all comes back in some respects to The Innovators Dilemma, said Levie. The most successful companies of the world are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But that value is pretty much all built on legacy technology. That technology has traditionally run in old school data centers with servers running single copies of software. Today it’s more about running elastic networks that can respond to increases and decreases in demand. And it’s that infrastructure that make apps available on iOS or Android devices.

Levie added that startups have an unfair advantage. They are better positioned to use the new modern infrastructures of the world.

The added difference is in the distribution capabilities. Those sexy data centers are enabling the capability to distribute to 100 million knowledge workers in the United States and billions of devices all over the world.