"Increasing mobile demand will drive a lot of the growth in cloud computing," stated James Strayer, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Racemi, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "But," Strayer continued, "there are still people running Windows NT 4 out there and there are probably even old IBM System/360s out there in production still."

Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?

James Strayer: Agree. I am often amazed at how many businesses don't even have the data yet, so getting it is a great first step. But the value is limited unless you can build useful information and models from it.

Cloud Computing Journal: Forrester's James Staten: "Not everything will move to the cloud as there are many business processes, data sets and workflows that require specific hardware or proprietary solutions that can't take advantage of cloud economics. For this reason we'll likely still have mainframes 20 years from now." Agree or disagree?

Strayer: Agree. Increasing mobile demand will drive a lot of the growth in cloud, but there are still people running Windows NT 4 out there and there are probably even old IBM System/360s out there in production still.

Cloud Computing Journal: The price of cloud computing will go up - so will the demand. Agree or disagree or....?

Strayer: Disagree on price, Agree on demand. Disagree on price because it is relatively easy to spin up a public cloud these days. With readily available colo space, free hypervisors like open source Xen and KVM, as well as open source "cloud in the box" platforms like OpenStack and CloudStack, there will likely continue to be low-cost alternatives for price conscious consumers. Of course, having said that, higher performance enterprise class clouds/managed clouds will likely go up moderately in price. We've seen heavy investment from big players in this space as a way to increase margin and differentiate from AWS, as unmanaged public cloud providers face growing price pressures.

Cloud Computing Journal: Rackspace is reporting an 80% growth from cloud computing, Amazon continues to innovate and make great strides, and Microsoft, Dell and other big players are positioning themselves as big leaders. Are you expecting in the next 18 months to see the bottom fall out and scores of cloud providers failing or getting gobbled up by bigger players? Or what?

Strayer: We'll see typical consolidation in the emerging market. Big players will consume other players and many smaller cloud providers that can't compete due to market saturation will fold.

Cloud Computing Journal: Please name one thing that - despite what we all may have heard or read - you are certain is NOT going to happen in the future, with Cloud and BigData? ;-)

Strayer: It will not solve world peace or end hunger.