The present obvious step for VARs is to embrace converged infrastructure and private clouds. But that’s not the right long-term move. Appliance manufacturers are all pushing converged infrastructure, where storage, networking and compute come in pre-loaded blocks that can be assembled into a private cloud. Future-focused CEOs see it differently: “Converged infrastructure is a stepping-stone to hybrid and public cloud,” Hayes noted. “The future is in public cloud where the traditional needs of the customer are dramatically different”.