We talk about cloud as a data center concept, but what about at the other end of the pipe?

Just as the cloud is revolutionizing the data center, there is an equally dramatic revolution going on at the the content consuming side of the compute world.

Namely, the trend towards mobile devices is emerging as a force.

An article in last week’s Newsweek magazine offered some interesting market numbers about Apple’s revenue split for desktop verses mobile products. PCs no longer dominate at Apple. It’s not even close. The company’s PC business has dropped from 70% of  revenue to less than 30%. (During that time, Apple’s share of the overall PC business has remained roughly flat, at about 8%.) In the PC’s place, mobile now rules the Apple roost. The iPad is selling a at a rate of one unit every 3 seconds. iPhone 4 pre-orders recently  brought ATT’s system to its knees.

While mobile is not yet the dominant model for the compute world — tablets have a tiny share of the overall market — it’s a trend that has a lot of interest.

The same Silicon Valley venture capitalists who invested early in the internet now are doing the same with tablets. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (a Xsigo investor) commented about iPad, “It is not a big iPod. It is a very big deal.” And he backed that up by doubling his firm’s iPad-related investment fund from $100M to $200M.

For data center managers, the implications are huge. Growth at the consuming end of the cloud can mean only one thing: equivalent growth at the distribution end of the cloud. Data center managers will be in the drivers seat as consumers seek better and richer ways to use these devices.

The trends towards mobile devices and VDI point to increased demand on data center managers to be responsive. More importantly, it’s a great opportunity to make the shift towards an inherently responsive infrastructure to make that job easier and far more cost effective.