CEO Outlook 2024: 15 Cloud Leaders Share Key Technology Investments Ahead
Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian, IBM’s Arvind Krishna and HPE’s Antonio Neri weigh in on key investment trends for cloud in 2024.
You can’t talk about enterprise technology in 2024 without mentioning artificial intelligence. But as a variety of CEOs at vendors big and small tell CRN, you can’t talk about AI without mentioning the cloud.
This year might be the year that AI makes a major splash with solution providers and their customers, but the AI rush has also opened up new opportunities for cloud practices and cloud technologies.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri are some of the cloud heavyweights to talk about where cloud is going and the effects of AI in written responses to CRN’s CEO Outlook 2024.
[RELATED: CEO Outlook 2024]
Cloud CEOs See AI Opportunities
“Thanks to the combination of Red Hat OpenShift, IBM software and infrastructure, and the reach of our ecosystem, IBM and our channel partners are well positioned for many more wins in the $1 trillion hybrid cloud market,” IBM’s Krishna said. “And with all the attention surrounding AI, it's worth noting that more than 60 percent of enterprises plan to deploy AI across the hybrid multi-cloud, making hybrid the foundation of the generative AI future.”
CEO Outlook 2024 also features insight from tech upstarts including ProsperOps, the maker of cost optimization software for Amazon Web Services.
As part of the project, ProsperOps CEO Chris Cochran, who founded the company in 2018, said that AI will affect conversations around cloud resource consumption.
“Some artificial intelligence applications can consume a great deal of cloud resources, making companies building AI-powered products more motivated to optimize their costs,” Cochran said. “Interestingly, teams sometimes try to solve the problem of ballooning cloud costs by throwing people at the problem, rather than combating increased costs caused by artificial intelligence with automation and AI.”
Read on for what some of the top cloud vendor leaders had to say in CRN’s CEO Outlook 2024.
And of course, see the full CEO Outlook project for more thoughts from these and other tech CEOs, including thoughts from some of the biggest networking CEOs.
Thomas Kurian
Google Cloud
CEO
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2024?
We’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, data analytics, cybersecurity, collaboration and AI technologies to meet customers’ needs. Today, we lead cloud service providers with strong differentiation in each category, and we look forward to continuing to expand these capabilities to better serve our customers.
All of these investments offer our partners and customers an unmatched opportunity with the emergence of generative AI. Our vision for generative AI has been to create a platform that allows people to build and use agents that can understand, reason and act on information in a similar way that humans do. For example, with Gemini, we offer a powerful multimodal large language model that includes advanced reasoning skills and cost efficiency; with Vertex AI, we provide a comprehensive set of tools, models and resources to build generative AI applications; and with Duet AI, we are embedding AI across products like Workspace and Google Cloud Platform to help customers and developers streamline tasks like content creation, code generation, note-taking and much more.
Importantly, we’re the most open cloud when it comes to AI. Google Cloud is the only major cloud provider offering both first-party AI models and third-party AI models on equal footing, which is an incredible differentiator when our partners speak with customers. We are not ‘all in’ or dependent on any particular model but are committed to offering broad choice. For instance, our Model Garden on Vertex AI offers 130-plus foundation models today. The choice of models and depth of capabilities on Google Cloud will continue to grow.
Arvind Krishna
IBM
Chairman, CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
I believe there are two equally important opportunities: AI and hybrid cloud.
I’ll start with AI. Our watsonx platform is designed to help partners and clients capitalize on the massive AI opportunity in three crucial ways:
- By allowing them to leverage multiple AI models, whether it’s IBM's models, open-source models or the models they co-create with us
- By focusing on key business use cases like customer service, coding, and digital labor;
- By accessing the governance tools to build trusted and transparent AI models.
Turning to hybrid cloud, this is now the most widespread form of IT architecture. Thanks to the combination of Red Hat OpenShift, IBM software and infrastructure, and the reach of our ecosystem, IBM and our channel partners are well positioned for many more wins in the $1 trillion hybrid cloud market.
And with all the attention surrounding AI, it’s worth noting that more than 60 percent of enterprises plan to deploy AI across the hybrid multi-cloud, making hybrid the foundation of the generative AI future.
Sheila Rohra
Hitachi Vantara
CEO
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2024?
A seamless experience from end to end is critical, which means combining our reliable portfolio of solutions with simplified selling tools and different options for flexible consumption, including pay-per-use solutions, to deliver real outcomes.
In addition to ongoing investment in these areas, Hitachi Vantara will continue expanding our bench of top technology alliance partners where our customers can benefit from cloud-agnostic solutions—leveraging the very best tools from VMware Tanzy Kubernetes to Red Hat Open Shift, Cisco Validated Design to VMware Cloud Foundation, Commvault to Veritas cloud data protection—and beyond.
Tom Leighton
Akamai Technologies
Co-Founder, CEO
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2024?
In 2024, Akamai has ambitious plans across our security and cloud portfolio. We continue to invest in our security solutions, specifically in support of our partner ecosystem, expanding around API security and microsegmentation, areas which lend themselves well to managed service offerings.
Akamai has developed a cloud deployment model that has enabled us to enable compute environments much closer to end users around the world. We deployed several dozen of these sites in 2023, which gives us compelling scale in terms of points of presence and proximity to both enterprise data centers and end users.
In 2024, we plan to integrate all of our cloud computing sites into Akamai’s unique global edge platform, offering superior performance as well as lower total cost of ownership for enterprise computing needs. Akamai is unique in having these data centers interconnected to the world’s most distributed edge platform with more than 4,100 points of presence across 750 cities and 130 countries.
We have the largest, most distributed edge platform on the planet, giving us a unique advantage as we interconnect our cloud regions to the larger network. We believe that next-generation applications will need next-generation cloud infrastructure, and we intend to chart the course for the next decade of cloud computing.
When more of the compute workloads can be developed and launched closer to the end user, to improve the customer experience and lower costs, we believe our platform will have an important edge over more centralized models.
We’re seeing good traction in our cloud computing partner ecosystem where we’re acquiring new customers by selling with cloud service providers and managed service providers.
Dave Friend
Wasabi Technologies
President, CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
Many of our channel partners have spent years selling hardware. They are new to the cloud. They are just learning that they can make more money selling cloud storage than they can selling overdistributed hardware.
The challenge for many channel partners will be to change long-standing habits as customers continue to move their data to the cloud. We are helping them along this journey.
Alan Masarek
Avaya
President, CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
Avaya remains focused on its commitment to being the industry leader in Customer Experience, and the rapid emergence of AI and other innovations that are shaping customer expectations.
The speed of these advances require transformation vs. evolution, and Avaya and its partners are in a tremendous position to help guide and facilitate our customers on their transformation journey.
Customers need a trusted partner with deep expertise, and Avaya has a history of supporting a diverse global customer base with complex needs. Acknowledging the challenges in transitioning to the cloud, Avaya recognizes that the cloud is not just a platform shift but a facilitator for the speed and agility required for innovation.
Avaya, along with its partners, are in a tremendous position to assist clients in evaluating and selecting the most suitable journey to meet their business objectives—whether it’s via cloud, hybrid or on-premises, we offer a comprehensive range of secure and robust solutions, along with the expertise and support at every step along the way. The goal is to enable clients to innovate at their own pace without disruptions.
Matt Cain
Couchbase
Chairman, President, CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
For Couchbase and its partners, there is an almost unprecedented market opportunity at the intersection of AI, cloud and edge.
All of us as users are demanding that applications become more adaptive, and AI will accelerate the advancement of adaptive applications. But most companies are just scratching the surface in leveraging AI’s potential. Simultaneously, customers continue to navigate their cloud strategy.
From managing multi-cloud environments to extending to the edge, cloud acceleration will help further the development of adaptive applications.
Simply put, applications are worthless without a database and a data platform to manage all of this complexity. These trends contribute to the database market’s substantial growth, which IDC projects will reach $136 billion in 2027.
Together with our partner ecosystem, Couchbase can meet modern applications’ high-performance and scalability demands. We believe that Couchbase was built for this moment.
Antonio Neri
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
President, CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
AI will be the most disruptive technology of our lifetimes, and our biggest opportunity in 2024 is to enable customers to become AI-powered businesses.
Enterprises recognize that AI requires a fundamentally new approach to IT that is hybrid by design. Going back to 2019, HPE became the pioneer in hybrid cloud and is now the leader through HPE GreenLake. 2024 is an opportunity for us and our channel partners to expand our reputation as our customers’ trusted partner in edge networking, hybrid cloud and AI.
Most importantly for channel partners, the opportunities expanded by AI impact the entire HPE portfolio, creating value across storage, computing, edge networking, private cloud, data center networking, routing, security and software. We are poised to take market share from the competition in AI and hybrid cloud, as well as storage, data center networking, telco solutions, compute and private cloud.
Dave McJannet
HashiCorp
CEO
What impact do you expect AI to have on the business you and your partners do together in 2024?
AI is already having an impact on cloud infrastructure: After all, AI workloads almost always are cloud workloads. This means that the core work that HashiCorp and our partners do of helping enterprises adopt the cloud will only become more important as AI becomes more prevalent.
But we will also continue to look at ways to incorporate AI into our products. We made several product announcements about the incorporation of AI into our products and services in 2023 and will undoubtedly do more in 2024.
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Nerdio
CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
Overall, cloud adoption growth isn’t going to slow down in 2024. On top of this, the challenges associated with the cloud, like increasing costs, will also continue to be an obstacle for channel partners. That’s why Nerdio helps MSPs make sense of Microsoft cloud technologies by reducing complexity, automating management and increasing margins all the while reducing costs.
Another opportunity will present itself more frequently in 2024 as generative AI technologies announced by Microsoft start showing up in the SMB market—MSPs can take hold of GenAI and start using tools like Microsoft Copilot to figure out how to improve the lives of their employees, drive customer value and build new revenue streams on top of GenAI services.
Rajiv Ramaswami
Nutanix
President, CEO
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?
Depending on where each organization is on the spectrum, CIOs today are modernizing legacy infrastructure, building and running modern apps and AI, running and managing apps and data across multiple clouds, and—in some forward-thinking cases—building portable apps that can be built once and run anywhere.
This is a stark contrast from a few years back when seemingly the only thing on every CIO’s mind was how quickly they could go to the public cloud.
Now, the conversation has shifted to what makes the most sense for their business, including cost optimization and data sovereignty. CIOs we talk with today have already implemented or are implementing a hybrid multi-cloud environment.
This is where Nutanix comes in. Our mission is to delight customers with an open hybrid multi-cloud platform with rich data services to run and manage apps anywhere.
Mark Barrenechea
OpenText
VIce Chair, CEO, CTO
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2024?
OpenText wholeheartedly embraces AI. We are integrating and embedding it into the core aspects of our solutions, crafting cognitive systems that will redefine our relationship with technology, both for ourselves and our customers.
I am optimistic about our growth agenda that assists customers in modernizing their businesses and information platforms. This involves consolidating customer data into our information cloud, furnishing cyber tools for trust and security, increasing the consumption of SaaS applications, enhancing developer productivity and quality, and constructing AI platforms for human use.
The promise of AI starts with great information management. We offer the most comprehensive information management platform in the market, giving customers many paths to value, and paving the way for new value as the world embraces AI.
For example, OpenText Aviator AI software is built into our business clouds; our Aviator solutions are embedded into our automation with pluggable language models; OpenText Aviator Thrust is building smarter applications; OpenText Aviator Search is interacting with information in whole new ways; OpenText Aviator IoT is embracing the next generation of device-generated information; and our individual OpenText Aviator Business Clouds are empowering organizations to work smarter.
Our ultimate aim is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and we are committed to innovating in all key AI areas: IoT and robots, complex systems, natural language processing, generative AI, decision automation, and ultimately, quantum computing. AGI focuses on automating decisions, shifting from software conducting traditional calculations to software making choices. Every role, every organization, and every industry are poised for transformation.
To borrow from C.S. Lewis, "[…]it is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better, but it is like turning a horse into a winged creature". That is how I perceive the AI opportunity.
Chris Cochran
ProsperOps
Co-Founder, CEO
What impact do you expect AI to have on the business you and your partners do together in 2024?
One way we see AI impacting cloud computing is cloud resource consumption. Some artificial intelligence applications can consume a great deal of cloud resources, making companies building AI-powered products more motivated to optimize their costs.
Interestingly, teams sometimes try to solve the problem of ballooning cloud costs by throwing people at the problem. Rather than combating increased costs caused by artificial intelligence with automation and AI.
Our partners and their customers continue to express demand for AI-powered solutions that can provide greater visibility into cloud costs and automatically deliver tangible value—cloud savings—to their bottom line.
Matt Hicks
Red Hat
President. nCEO
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2024?
It's not surprising to say that AI is an area in which we are making a lot of technology investments. But at the core, the areas we will be focusing on are the areas our customers need us to. Right now that is AI.
Every single one of our customers is formulating a strategy for AI. They’re trying to figure out how to use it and how to make it work for them. They are also in different places on their journeys. Some are just beginning while others are quite far down the path. Our job is to meet them where they are. As a platform company, we have to be relentlessly focused on the applications we support.
Our job is to make these applications easier to support, be able to run anywhere, and to perform best when running on our hybrid cloud technology. We know platforms, we know open source, we provide choice. We are going to continue to focus on cloud services, edge computing, and hybrid cloud infrastructure so we can provide that choice.
All’applications aren’t created equally. For some, hybrid doesn’t matter. For others, performance isn't critical. Some are so stable that support isn’t top of mind. But with AI, you need all of them.
Our solutions at Red Hat truly make the difference between companies succeeding or failing in this space because we enable organizations to use the AI models, hardware, and clouds they want—it’s choice up and down the AI stack. That’s the value we bring and that is where we will continue to invest.
George Kurian
NetApp
CEO
What do you see as the toughest challenges facing customers in 2024?
In 2024, enterprises will need to balance flexibility and scalability with security, compliance and governance. Data needs to be both accessible and secure for optimal use.
The right data foundation can help with this, as well as the right approach to hybrid multi-cloud management—some data can be stored on-prem, some in the cloud, and some in both places at different times and for different use cases.
AI is the perfect example, with proofs of concept often tested in the cloud and then, once success is seen, scaled and secured in the data center. As businesses continue to tap into the power of their data, they’ll look to the hybrid approach as the perfect balance of security and agility.