North Bridge Venture Partneres general partner Paul Santinelli led Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies and Evernote vice president of operations Alexei Rodriguez through a lightning-fast review of Gigaom’s Structure Conference Thursday afternoon, where they gave their blessing to the internet of things, cloud computing and Facebook’s networking switch. But the duo agreed that venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is mistaken about removing humans from IT.
Rodriguez pointed out that despite his support of the cloud, Evernote actually uses a data center since it prefers to keep its users’ data under its control at all times. If they did use the cloud, it would be four times more expensive for the company to switch, he said.
“I believe it’s a winner even if we’re not using it. What it enables is phenomenal,” Rodriguez said. “But going into it you need to understand what is the tipping point. When do you need to bail?”
He went on to say that the cloud isn’t all “ponies and rainbows” for companies that do decide to use it. Professionalism and safety are still important.
Both Rodriguez and Santinelli agreed that Facebook’s switch will not be usable by the everyday person, but it will be useful for the five or so other companies that can make use of it.
Photo by Jakub Mosur
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