Kapil Bakshi
Chief Solutions Architect, Cisco Systems Inc.

Agencies are either in the planning stages for optimization or they are already involved in the consolidation and virtualization aspects. The key trend to track over the next few years will be how cloud computing influences services that data centers provide. We fully anticipate data center optimization strategies will include cloud computing, initially in the form of private clouds, followed by hybrid and community clouds.

There is a lot of interesting activity in the industry around this trend. We are certainly leading in many of these areas. However, there's still a lot of work that has to be done in terms of standards, compliance, security and procurement and how you actually go about making the organizational and governance changes to accommodate all of this.