Gartner has released a new report that predicts a 7 year time frame for the maturation of Cloud based technologies (Here is the associated press release). They talk about a three phase evolution of the markets, spread all the way to 2015. They call the current phase (2007-2011) as Pioneers and Trailblazers. They call the second phase from 2010 to 2013 as Market Consolidation phase and, finally, the third phase from 2012 to 2015 as Mainstream Critical Mass and Commoditization phase.
I do agree that Cloud Computing is still in the early stages and we may as well be in the Trailblazer stage. However, I disagree with their prediction about slow movement towards maturation of the markets. I expect a much faster shift. Cloud economics is very attractive and the whole world is going through one of the most difficult economic periods. Unless the dinosaur like enterprises bring in cloud economics into their strategy real fast, there is a danger of them vanishing much like the dinosaurs themselves. I am pretty confident that the current economic climate will accelerate the Cloud adoption and market maturation will happen much sooner than the Gartner’s predictions.
I also have problem with their prediction that the concern for vendor lock-in in 2014 will force critical-mass support for open source stack in the clouds. Unlike the previous IT era, users are much smarter in not falling into the trap of proprietary technologies. Thanks to the open source movements in the last decade and more, openness is now part of the users’ psyche. It will be tough for proprietary vendors to survive in the Cloud marketplace compared to the previous era. Gartner is way off the mark in this prediction too. They are grossly underestimating the role of open stacks in this Cloud era.
I agree. I think that adoption will be like many things, an exponential curve with a sudden tipping point. Progress will probably be very slow this year, as people wait for the recession to bottom out. But when take-up starts to grow, it will grow very suddenly and rapidly. Similar to my take on Web 2.0 within business – http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2008/12/web-20-will-thrive-but-not-yet-while.html
7 years ago, in 2002, who would have predicted the popularity of the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Flickr…
And you’re spot on with the openness of the stack. Unless Microsoft starts treating IE like its hardware (you don’t need a MS keyboard to use Windows), their online services will struggle.
I think we have to be careful not to simply restrict thinking to cloud economics. There are plenty of technical challenges to be overcome that weight equally heavily on the minds of CXOs
I definitely agree about the technological challenges that needs to be overcome. My argument is that cloud economics will be too enticing in this era of economic instability and that could accelerate the adaption, and therefore maturation, of cloud based technologies. Don’t you think the 7 year prediction is way too conservative even with the default evolution rate of enterprises?
Have to agree with you, Ben – Gartner makes the mistake of lumping together the whole SaaS market. In CODA’s experience, the take-up of SaaS in small, medium and large organizations is proceeding at different rates – smaller organizations are generally using SaaS more extensively then larger ones for example.
Take-up also depends on industry sector, with services, consulting, media and high-tech moving ahead faster than others.
Gartner’s projections on the time it will take for service-enabled application platforms (SEAP) to evolve is wrong. Cloud-to-cloud linking is already a fundamental requirement for SaaS applications. Right now, CODA 2go on Force.com is fully integrated with Google Apps and Amazon S3. On top of that, we link to other clouds for payments and other add-ons. All of this demonstrates that SEAP platforms are more mature than Gartner gives them credit for.