Chris Priemesberger, Editor-in-Chief of eWeek talks about current trends with open source and cloud platforms

There are a lot of trends. Without open source software, we wouldn't have the world we have today, because it's everywhere. It's in all of our devices. It's in all of our communications. It's in the internet. It's everywhere. But breaking it down a little bit, open source continues to be used in all software development. Every company I talk to goes into GitHub or SourceForge and finds pieces that they can use to build upon so they can build apps that we use on our phones, and on our tablets, and on our laptops. So there's a continuing trend. People around the world who are giving to that community their talents into a big pool of software that can be used by lots of others is a great democratizer. And big companies like Oracle and companies like Quest and others are using that to improve their own products. So trend, I think more. More is a trend for open source. And I don't see it slowing down anytime soon, because it's so valuable. And alternatively, what are some of the main challenges that enterprises face in hopping on these trends? Yeah. Well, they're looking for tried and true code and other components that work for their use cases. So you can go into a library, like I said GitHub, or SourceForge, or one of the others, look up what you need, add it to your software application, whatever it is. It can really help you. You can also work on that to customize it as necessary. And so I know Quest has done that and done it very well. Oracle has too. And I think the problems are solved by people having already solved those problems. So you don't have to go and reinvent the proverbial wheel. Find the component. Add it in. If it works, great. If it doesn't, you can fine tune it or trifle with it a little bit to make it fit. So Chris, what are some of the trends that you're seeing as it relates to cloud? Well, cloud is everywhere. And we take it for granted. But we're using cloud apps every day on our phones. We're using them on our televisions. We're using them in our cars. Where were we before the cloud? It's hard to understand, but it's relatively new. In fact, only maybe 10 or 12 years old that it's been mainstream, that we've been able to use these apps that are not on our devices or somewhere else. But they're giving us service and helping us with maps. Whenever you open a Google Map, it's a cloud app. Whenever you look at Yelp to find out a good pizza place or whatever, you're using a cloud app. So all these things we take for granted now. But 10 years ago when we were first discovering this and using this, this was all new and very exciting. And it still is. I still think that we're just in the very beginning of our aptitude to use cloud. There's so many other ways we can use it. I think innovation is popping right now. And I think we're seeing it at shows like Oracle World. We're seeing a lot of good ideas. And we're seeing a lot of really interesting companies that are coming to the fore with ideas that we're going to be using tomorrow, that we might not have thought about yesterday. But we're going to be using them tomorrow. And it's all about the cloud, because the cloud is everywhere. And alternatively, what are some of the biggest challenges that enterprises face today as it relates to moving to the cloud? Well, companies get used to having their own data centers and their own apps running on boxes somewhere. And that's fine. But there are some limitations involved with that. You have to keep buying storage for those things. And they have to be patched with security patches, et cetera. Whereas if you have the cloud service, which does the same thing, you don't have to worry about those things. The cloud service will take care of your security update, will take care of your patch, will take care of the versioning update. So that's two or three less things you have to worry about if you're a company. Now, the cloud will also scale. So if your application gets really big and all of a sudden you've got hundreds of thousands of users instead of just 1,000 users, they can scale too. So there's a lot more choices, a lot more flexibility with the cloud that you don't have to worry about. And that's why so many companies now, they're not building their own data centers anymore. They're just signing up for services that they can use every day. And they can be comfortable with them. That's great insight, Chris. Appreciate your time.