John Furrier had finished another interview on #theCube today and we started talking about OpenStack and VMware. There’s all kinds of speculation about how the cloud computing market will transform. But does that matter right now?

John said Puppet Labs Founder and CEO Luke Kanies put it well in the discussion they had on theCube. The issue is not the future but what is happening now. Why? There are enough problems to deal with. Puppet helps companies automate IT. They provide the capabilities to move thousands of virtual machines. That’s the issue right now. The cloud just accentuates these issues. There’s no time to create custom scripts to solve configuration issues. It needs to be automated so companies can get the enterprise ready for the cloud.

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Siki Giunta of CSC  reiterated this issue in a conversation I had with her after she also appeared on The Cube.

She said to me that business culture is still a hurdle as companies move to the cloud. For example, business processes don’t really translate to people who are just entering the workforce. They are not accustomed to using software as a previous generation did. But they do know the Web and they know how to use data to make apps. What are you going to do if you can’t give these people the tools they need to create new things? This highlights how different people are who have grown up online. They know how to use it to make things. They don’t write a Word document with bullet points. They pull up an app on their iPad and draw a mind map to show what they are thinking. That’s who they are. They are part of the new culture that have to be understood and utilized in order for us to actually realize what the cloud provides.

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We get so caught up in trying to grok how the cloud will affect us in the future. The opportunity is right now to do something. And that’s the future of the cloud.