DMR: Where do you see the future of Cloud?

Pete Grillo: The future of computing, I think, is these handheld smart phones. I think everything else is sort of incidental. I still maintain that these will be limited in their computing abilities, and I think your cell phone, your smart phone with the Cloud, is the answer to the future of computing.

DMR: Are you saying that handheld devices are merely displaying and interpreting small chunks of data – the actual work is going to be done somewhere else?

Pete Grillo: Absolutely. It has to be for just a whole bunch of reasons: For instance, these computers on my desk: rarely do I lose them, rarely are they stolen. Laptops are stolen. Cell phones are dropped in the water all the time. Having any kind of permanency on a cell phone is ridiculously crazy.

DMR: If I start having different kind of applications for different mobile devices and I want to do exactly what you said before – what kind of campaign did I run last winter – then you’re suddenly looking at a campaign on a smart phone that’s not anymore on the market. Form factors might change. Isn’t that very difficult suddenly to do data analysis on every changing form factor and user input devices and user behavior? And also the phone you were designing a page for by now had only a quarter of the computing capacity or screen resolution than the phone a year later.

Pete Grillo: Or a tenth of it.

DMR: Exactly. Suddenly you might have Flash on the phone; suddenly you might do more data analysis on the screen; suddenly it might be immersive with 3D or something like that.

Pete Grillo: You have to sit on the pipe to see what’s being delivered down to end users. It becomes the delivery networks that can track that stuff, for ad monitoring, for example.

DMR: Interesting. So you’re saying telecoms have a very strong position in that game?

Pete Grillo: Well yeah. That’s the pipe. I was thinking of the DoubleClicks of the future that are writing the software – it could be the telecoms that monitor that. That would be very interesting.

DMR: Thank you for your time and insights!

Pete Grillo: My pleasure.