Companies waiting for cloud service providers to make them more agile shouldn’t hold their breath, according to technology executive Tom Joyce (pictured, right).

He told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, that agility has become a buzzword for good reason.

“If I can reconfigure everything and build a new service and I can do it today versus plan for months — that benefit and the dollars around that are game changing,” he said.

Joyce stated that connectivity between the cloud itself and the end user is what enables real agility — and cloud providers have not yet touched it.

In an interview at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio during our coverage of this year’s Mobile World Congress, Joyce said the main obstacle to agility is the network bottleneck. He sees companies attacking this with virtualization and new methods of WAN management.

But, software will only take them so far without real innovation to the underlying silicon, he added.

The Internet of Things, 5G, mobile applications and big data analytics all require huge leaps in agility, and Joyce said this will necessitate new hardware. Customers will increasingly tell IT providers, “I can’t use your old stuff. You can’t bundle up the crap you have. You need to give me something that’s tuned for the scale I’m talking about now and next,” he said.

Hard assets

Joyce’s recommendation is for venture capitalists to invest much more in silicon innovation, something he sees just beginning to bud now.

“The startups that are going to succeed in the future that relate to this problem, they’re not the guy building an app — that’s not where it is. It’s technology that’s actually hard,” he noted, highlighting Nvidia Corp. as one innovator in this space with high stock prices to prove its current success.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress 2017 Barcelona.

Photo: SiliconANGLE