Brad: I'm interested in your key thoughts on industry trends to watch in 2016?

Bailey: I guess the one that you hear about the most these days is containers. Right or wrong, we've been ignoring the hype on the container front, which is why we didn't jump into Docker containers a year ago. We've been using containers for a long time. The technology's not new, we have moved all of RightScale production on to containers and saved a lot of money as a resultt and it's improved our ability to execute.We've released our own container support because the stuff's really good. This is never going to be a one-hammer-can-hit-all-nails environment. I think anyone who believes that there is a container-only strategy for any significant consumer of IT services is fooling themselves. Even if there were, the nuance and complexity of applications doesn't get solved by containers. You're just putting the app in a different, much more scalable environment. You still have to handle all the complexity of software associated with that. So I think containers will have a definitive impact on the market. I think you're going to see the mega clouds continue to evolve and grab market share. The market itself is growing massively. The last time I heard about percentages, 95% of all compute cycles are not in the cloud. They're still in data centers. They're still running applications.

Brad: There's a big elephant in the room.

Bailey: So we have a long way to go as an industry in terms of the size of the [Cloud] pie increasing. I definitely think one of the bigger trends with respect to application delivery is not new, but it's going to become ubiquitous. It's going to be Composite Application Architectures that use some PaaS, some IaaS, and some SaaS capabilities. Because ultimately, by doing that, you deliver a solution in weeks that might have taken you a year. So as an enterprise, who have produced a cool new mobile app that uses a SaaS service, some IaaS, and a Platform-as-a-Service capability, the complexity of that environment is much different than provisioning servers and running software on those servers. CMPs, Cloud Management Platforms, I think, will continue to increase in the market because of that complexity. The only way you can stitch these things together in any cognizant sense is through a single pane of glass environment like a CMP.