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Wikibon research argues ‘true’ private cloud market is smaller than AWS share

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Organisations are starting to conflate the private and public clouds – yet new research from Wikibon finds the market size of ‘true’ private cloud implementations is lower than the revenues of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading public infrastructure as a service player.

Wikibon’s research aims to clarify private cloud and differentiate between solutions marketed by vendors and implementations by businesses. The research body assesses the true private cloud at $7 billion (£4.9bn), lower than AWS at $7.9bn and significantly lower than the overall IaaS public cloud market of $25bn in 2015. The analysis argues the private cloud market will in time be of a similar level to the traditional on-premises IT market as the latter drops in size.

According to the analysis, the top four companies in the private cloud base are HP Enterprise, Oracle, VMware, and EMC, with IBM, NetApp and Cisco trailing.

The author of the piece, Brian Gracely, assesses several reasons why private cloud has not kept up with the growth of public cloud:

  • Virtualisation is not cloud: Wikibon argues the capabilities of virtualisation are now mature, and the need for it is slowing
  • Cloud management is not a high priority IT focus: it is very difficult to be a standalone cloud management software business, according to the researchers
  • Do business apps need a private cloud? The ownership of SaaS applications is often managed outside the core IT teams

It’s nothing new, but the changing focus on private cloud means providers are looking at products which offer the benefits of both. CenturyLink’s launch in 2014 aimed to offer the agility of a public cloud with the security of a private cloud, while earlier this month Rackspace’s announcement attempted to do similarly.

The research also examined the highest paying tech skills, with HANA ahead of database Cassandra, Cloudera, platform as a service in general and OpenStack. A piece from Firebrand Training featured in this publication earlier this week argued database, Linux, and security as among the most in-demand cloud skills for 2016.