"The Obama/Kundra effect of pushing more government data to the web and promoting the application of cloud scale efficiencies has been felt across all markets," noted Bart Copeland, President & CEO of ActiveState Software, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "The thought leadership and leadership by example," Copeland continued, "has raised both the visibility and spurred the growth of a number of important projects."

Cloud Computing Journal: How fast will the last remaining barriers to enterprise-wide cloud adoption melt away - are secure public clouds feasible, for example, or only private ones?

Bart Copeland: Enterprise adoption of private IaaS is definitely on the rise as one solution for eliminating these barriers. We believe that the advent of Private PaaS solutions such as Stackato will further accelerate enterprise use of private clouds.

As for "secure," this has a number of connotations. In the sense that your container is impenetrable by others housed on the same servers or cloud - yes, we believe this is feasible. In the sense that data privacy is protected, this may only become a reality on private clouds. We are still seeing governance and compliance issues with the public cloud. Our customers are asking for recommendations for geo-location specific hosting services, which tells us this is going to be an issue for some time.

Cloud Computing Journal: What is the biggest new dimension of consumer cloud computing? Is it Cloud Telecoms, Cloud TV, Cloud Music, or what?

Copeland: It has to be mobile applications leveraging the cloud. As consumer applications need to run on a diverse eco-system of devices, deploying them as web applications with cloud scale back ends will be the biggest new dimension. Of those applications, Facebook and gaming applications are certainly some of the biggest drivers in the consumer cloud market - even if the consumer does not realize the application is running on the cloud per se.

Cloud Computing Journal: How much of an influence on cloud adoption is the US government's continuing support of cloud strategies for all government agencies?

Copeland: The Obama/Kundra effect of pushing more government data to the web and promoting the application of cloud scale efficiencies has been felt across all markets. The thought leadership and leadership by example has raised both the visibility and spurred the growth of a number of important projects such as NASA's participation in the OpenStack initiatives.

Cloud Computing Journal: What impact does the arrival of Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, IBM, Cisco and the other giants have on the smaller cloud players?

Copeland: The arrival of the big vendors gives validation to the private cloud market. While the giants are stumbling and repackaging their existing offerings as "cloud" without truly moving beyond virtualization and granting real elasticity, portability or diversity in their offerings, the smaller players can innovate, shift, and get to market faster.

Cloud Computing Journal: What can Cloud Expo attendees expect to see from you in Santa Clara?

Copeland: I will be speaking more about "Why Private PaaS Is Not an Oxymoron," and Diane Mueller, ActiveState's Enterprise Product Manager, will be talking about "US Patriot Act: Making the Case for Enterprise Cloud."

At our Booth (#415), we will be showcasing Stackato, our cloud platform for creating a private PaaS. Stackato enables enterprises to rapidly deploy, scale and manage their applications, whether new or existing, across multiple cloud infrastructures and hypervisors - vSphere, Amazon EC2 and others. Come see us at booth #415, or take a test drive at activestate.com/cloud today!

• Any Language, Any Stack, Any Cloud