Q&A: Reza Malekzadeh, vice president of marketing at Nimbula

I think it is not going to be black and white.

I have a hard time imagining three big providers that are all completely secluded from each other because I don't think customers want to go that way. I think, at the same time, customers have seen true value coming out of shared infrastructure.

I have the feeling that it is going to be a mix where you can have a lot of commodity applications that you can run on [the public cloud], which doesn't provide you with SLAs and makes it easy to fire off things. But, maybe there will be a number of smaller niche players that will address, say, the legal market because lawyers for example have a specific type of data privacy issue and those guys will build a slightly different service for that particular market.

I can see a nice mix but I definitely think that the idea of using your own and someone else's equipment is something that will prevail in the long term because it just makes economic sense.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.