The reason for vendor disruption is clear. We are in the midst of a radical transformation of the entire IT landscape. Cloud, mobile, big data and IoT technologies are redefining all areas of business -- closing the gap between businesses and their customers, improving data-driven decision making throughout the enterprise, and accelerating end-to-end business process redesign.

Legacy, client-server, hardware-centric technologies with their dense, inflexible software stacks simply cannot keep pace with today's fast-changing market conditions, especially when it comes to new customer-facing applications that demand massive scalability, flexibility and agility.