A trip to Microsoft's European Azure cloud datacentre in Dublin
John Shaw is CIO, Kingspan, a company that operates in the construction sector, He said the company is piloting its ecommerce platform on Azure.
He said smart devices and the concept of the smart city will create a huge amount of big data, which will depend on Azure for processing.
He said that unlike other cloud services, there is less lock-in with Azure. "Microsoft brings the concept of reversibility. You can move Hyper-V instances between cloud and in-house."