Aaron and Brian talk with Jonathan Donaldson (@jdonalds; VP/GM, Software Defined Infrastructure at Intel) about old times, how quickly the Cloud Computing market is evolving, the breadth of projects that the Intel SDI groups engages with, how to growth the number of clouds, and how Intel is addressing the IoT market.


Intel Cloud for All 
Intel Software Defined Infrastructure
Jonathan’s Blog


Topic 1 - Aaron and I both have known you for many years, and worked with you in various other organizations, but give our listeners not only your background but the things you’re working on at Intel these days.

Topic 2 - The market is going pretty crazy these days as it relates to cloud - Dell/EMC merger and subsequent Virtustream announcement; HP getting out of public cloud (again); AWS announcing huge growth and new services; Rackspace becoming a service company for other clouds. Intel has pretty unique perspective. Help us see through all this cloudiness.

Topic 3 - A lot of us follow Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) and the stuff he’s interested in (container, scheduling frameworks, automation, etc.) and we see some of the investments that Intel makes (or maybe they are just partnerships). As a VP/GM, how do you think about strategy when so many dynamics (economics, technology) are changing so rapidly?

Topic 4 - The Cloud for All program is talking about “1000s of Clouds”. What do you think are the biggest areas that need to improve for that to happen, and are there some core applications that might accelerate this?

Topic 5 - We’re starting to see lots of companies announce IoT platforms (Salesforce, AWS, SAP, Dell, Cisco, etc.). IoT is a cloud play and a device play. Where does Intel and SDI see the state of IoT these days?