"The cloud is so new, and is dominated by such a small number of players right now, that prices are much higher than they will be," noted Cory Isaacson, CEO and CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "As demand goes up and new entrants come into the market, the cost will decrease overall," Isaacson continued. "Cloud computing will be a commodity service worldwide within the next few years - I see this as inevitable."

Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?

Cory Isaacson: This is absolutely true; data is meaningless without turning it into useful information. Almost always this involves relating the data to other data (e.g., "How many people purchased Product X last month?" involves relating a customer to a product and a time period).

Cloud Computing Journal: Forrester's James Staten: "Not everything will move to the cloud as there are many business processes, data sets and workflows that require specific hardware or proprietary solutions that can't take advantage of cloud economics. For this reason we'll likely still have mainframes 20 years from now." Agree or disagree?

Isaacson: While I think more and more workload will move to the cloud. James is right - some things just won't fit into the economics. But we are seeing an increase in all types of capabilities, especially database capabilities that do make sense in the cloud. That trend is here to stay.

Cloud Computing Journal: The price of cloud computing will go up - so will the demand. Agree or disagree or....?

Isaacson: I predict just the opposite. The cloud is so new, and is dominated by such a small number of players right now, that prices are much higher than they will be. As demand goes up and new entrants come into the market, the cost will decrease overall. This also ties with expected reductions in hardware and infrastructure costs. Cloud computing will be a commodity service worldwide within the next few years - I see this as inevitable.

Cloud Computing Journal: Rackspace is reporting an 80% growth from cloud computing, Amazon continues to innovate and make great strides, and Microsoft, Dell and other big players are positioning themselves as big leaders. Are you expecting in the next 18 months to see the bottom fall out and scores of cloud providers failing or getting gobbled up by bigger players? Or what?

Isaacson: On the contrary, I believe there is still more demand than supply by a long shot, and demand is likely to continue to rise for at least the next several years. Having more competition will be great for the market, and frankly will help the existing dominators too. As competition increases, people will have more choices, and those choices will mean better service levels, reduced costs and an easier-to-use experience. Open source efforts such as Cloud Stack and Open Stack will make this a reality too.

Cloud Computing Journal: Please name one thing that - despite what we all may have heard or read - you are certain is NOT going to happen in the future, with Cloud and BigData? ;-)

Isaacson: The one fallacy is that everyone will move off of traditional relational database engines, and move to NoSQL as a platform. Certainly the NoSQL adoption has been strong; it's great for certain use cases. But over time the SQL options will get better and better too. Considering that well over 60% of the market is still using traditional RDMBS technology, demand for improvements in that technology will rise at a very fast pace now that the initial early adopter phase of NoSQL is winding down.