Fire up the Wayback Machine, and let’s travel back to the year 1996 — the time when the Telecommunications Act paved a competitive pathway for traditional phone companies and internet businesses. It’s also the year that coined the term “carrier hotel.” Carrier hotels marked the transition point from telcos to data centers, thus opening the new frontier of data processing outside the walls of traditional enterprises.
Fast-forward to today, and carrier hotels have evolved into hybrid IT environments, where workloads are processed on-premises, across different cloud formations, and through virtual realms. For the foreseeable future, the hybrid IT model is where the workloads will remain. Katy Huberty, head of North American technology hardware equity research at Morgan Stanley, underscored this workload processing duality.