It’s tough to go back to on-premises data centers after a jaunt through the burgeoning world of cloud computing. Companies today can test and deploy new software in much more rapid cycles. There is a trend toward even greater openness. Some envision fluid information technology where data leads process. It’s beyond agile; it’s plastic.

“Openness is really becoming the battle cry for the cloud,” said Judith Hurwitz (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Hurwitz & Associates LLC. 

When companies talk about cloud, they really just mean bare compute power, according to Hurwitz. They want an open multicloud environment where they can move workloads purely for performance. This freedom of movement is what all cloud technology is driving toward.

“I think if we’re having this conversation 10 years from now, we wouldn’t be talking about cloud,” Hurwitz said. “We would be talking about the elasticity and the way we do computing, so it really meets the needs of whatever business change you’re experiencing.”

Hurwitz spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Innovation Day event in Yorktown Heights, New York. They discussed the movement toward openness, plasticity and data-led business processes. (* Disclosure below.)

Process takes a backseat to data

What has held back enterprises and information technology organizations for years is the single platform or application to which they’re bolted, according to Hurwitz.

What if companies had access to software services that are malleable? What if they could change them easily without having to recode them from top to bottom? What if they could apply a single, malleable software service to any business logic or business strategy? That would be more than agile; that would be plastic software.

“In the past, we’ve always written the applications or written systems as though they were based on how we do business right now,” Hurwitz said. “And when you do that, you can’t change.”

Malleable software allows businesses to change much more rapidly. They can then allow the freshest available to data inform their processes.

“If you lead with process, that’s the past. If you lead with data, data will lead you to process,” Hurwitz said. “Using [data] in a predictive analytics way, really using machine-learning algorithms and some of the emerging AI techniques — we can begin to have data drive us to process.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Innovation Day event. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE