Hypervisor Architect Makes Migration to Azure Easy

In this Tech Barometer podcast, Rene van den Bedem of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division discusses the future of AI and how cloud computing is evolving to power more aspects of life.

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Transcript (AI generated):

Rene van de Bedem: When I started, the personal computer was becoming more miniaturized.

Jason Lopez: Rene van den Bedem says when he started his career in computing it was 1994. The trend was smaller and more compact machines. Windows 3, with a more user-friendly, graphical interface was the dominant OS. It was a period of diversification in personal computing. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. Rene van de Bedem is Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, where he does a lot of work in cloud and digital transformation. We asked him about the state of enterprise computing and he ushered us into a sort of timeline, that ends up at AI... but starts in the 90s with computers becoming more miniaturized.

Rene van de Bedem: And then the networking constructs had just come out.

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Jason Lopez: The emergence of ethernet, token ring technology, and TCP/IP, ithelped establish the building blocks for the interconnected world we live in today. It was the beginning of the transition from military and academic use to the public.

Rene van de Bedem: Jump 10 years later, we went from narrowband in telco, so you know, like PSTN, dial-up modems, 64k data circuits.

Jason Lopez: This shift from slow to faster connectivity, laid the groundwork for the high speed internet technologies that would make cloud possible.

Rene van de Bedem: Jump to let’s say 2001-2002, you had the explosion of the internet. The internet really became this mainstream thing.

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Jason Lopez: This was the dot-com era, with faster chips, advances in hardware. It moved us from dial-up to broadband, It was a time marked by the spread of wi-fi. Mobility was becoming a big deal.

Rene van de Bedem: So you had all of these building blocks coming together to where we are now, with the invention of the cloud back in 2006, I think it was, with AWS.

Jason Lopez: There was a fundamental transformation in information technology, where physical infrastructure was being replaced by the cloud. It gave users unprecedented levels of accessibility, efficiency, and scalability.

Rene van de Bedem: And now in 2024 with AI, we’re now on this cusp of this next rocket launch that’s coming.

Jason Lopez: AI is becoming a tool with a wide range of uses, much the way calculators did back in the 80s and 90s. Microsoft, Rene says, is integrating AI into all its products. That’s called “co-pilot.” This change signals a transformation to the era we’re entering, where AI is a must have technology.

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Rene van de Bedem: People who work in an industry, if they don’t adopt these new tools, they’re going to be left behind. So in 10 years time, all jobs around the world, most of them will have some type of AI-based co-pilot that you’ll need to use to do your job, and those that don’t, they’ll just be left behind.

Jason Lopez: It’s a continual evolution. And it especially applies to tech companies which must adapt to the changing needs and challenges of storing and processing an ever-increasing volume of data.

Rene van de Bedem: Obviously, having very, very fast, expensive storage, you need that for a part of the workloads, but then the ability to archive petabytes of data so that you can derive business value from your data sets, that’s a necessity. So storage is always evolving. I’m sure it’s similar is going to be true for quantum computing. We’re going to see a shift in the way that we build our traditional computing models so that that can harness and integrate with AI as well as quantum computing.

Jason Lopez: Cloud service providers are beginning to offer quantum products in a limited way, though scalable quantum computers are not yet a reality. Right now, it’s in the realm of researchers and developers to experiment with quantum princi...