What Do the Next Five Years Look Like for YellowDog?

As YellowDog celebrates its fifth year in business, Founder and CEO, Gareth reveals what he sees happening in the next five years for the cloud and for YellowDog. 

The Changes Ahead for YellowDog

I always enjoy looking at the problem in front of us. In our opinion, the market can be split into three stages of cloud adoption and infrastructure maturity:

Stage 1: A business is experimenting putting applications and workloads into the cloud – this could be for cost reasons, a need for agility, or due to a lack of power.

Stage 2: An enterprise is comfortable with using the cloud and they’ve started to think about where best to put these workloads – e.g. on-premise or in the cloud, cost, price, performance, environmentally-friendly data centres…

Stage 3: A business is seeking to actively optimise their workloads using machine learning wherever they are running: on-premise, in the cloud or the multi-cloud.

Many market analysts agree that today, only between 1-2% of businesses across the globe are in Stage 3. Most enterprises are still operating at Stage 1 with a few in Stage 2. These percentages decrease when you consider the workloads and applications that YellowDog is really good at: those complex applications that need high performance computing to work really effectively.

Most of these processes are still run in data centres but CIOs are beginning to examine putting them into the cloud: partly to take account of the increased agility the cloud brings; partly to ensure they have access to the latest and greatest (and fastest) processors; and partly because environmental impact is becoming more and more important. Why invest in a carbon-guzzling data centre yourself when you can securely access lower-carbon options in the cloud?

This is all a huge opportunity for YellowDog: for these complex applications, our platform delivers effective hybrid and multi-cloud enablement, migration, efficiency and optimisation.

The Changes Ahead for ‘Cloud’

Redefining ‘Cloud’ before 2025

I think, instead of having cloud compute and on-premise compute as mutually exclusive, they will become synonymous with one another. I think “the cloud” will be the umbrella term used to describe dynamically allocated computing power, storage and networking that may be hosted by cloud providers within the domain of individual enterprises. Whether you own it or someone else owns it, it will all be “the cloud”.

I envision a world where you put in a resource request for computing power and receive that computing power based on the set of characteristics that you’re looking for. This could be a request for something low cost, something high performing, something secure, or something that is sourced from a data centre using environmentally sustainable energy.

Redefining High Performance Computing (HPC) before 2025

I think we will see businesses look more and more to “high performance computing” to solve many of their problems.  We’ll no longer have “data bases”; we will live in a world with enormous unstructured data lakes or data oceans, with massive resource intensive analytics sitting on top. Processes such as machine learning and agent-based modelling will increase in popularity and will add to the need for massive processing on demand. Enterprises are placing big bets on this tech and we’re very well placed to capitalise on this and bring some innovation to the table.

What do I want YellowDog to focus on between now and 2025?

Because of a large and rapidly changing market, you can’t always predict what’s around the corner. However, there are two things we can control, and I’d like to see us abide by them no matter what.

• We want YellowDog to continue working on interesting and important problems. We don’t know for sure what those challenges and problems will be in five years’ time, but whatever they are, I’d like to think that we’ll be working on technically challenging problems that are important to our customers but where they are currently unsatisfied with their current solution.
• We want YellowDog to be an amazing place to work. We want the company to be recognised nationally as a Best Place to Work. I’m super proud of the team we have. It is not just about salary, our team come to work because they like the problems they’re solving, they like the people they’re working with, and they like the contribution they make. Given the acceleration we are now experiencing, a brilliant and motivated team who have real purpose is crucial.