2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. AWS has proven its rapid pace of innovation and has introduced great leaders who have completely replaced the concept of sluggish IT servers with instances. While the market is still relatively small, I believe it will take over the IT market sooner than some of us think. I am not alone in my forecast… another analyst predicted that AWS will become a $50B business in 2015, which means it will multiply 12 times its size from last year. So, have a look at my 2013 predictions and read on to see what 2014 has in store for the world of cloud computing.
Monthly Archives: January 2014
5 Cloud Predictions for 2014
By John Dixon, LogicsOne
Here are my 5 Cloud Predictions for 2014. As always, leave a comment below and let me know what you think!
1. IaaS prices will drop by at least 20%
Amazon has continued to reduce its pricing since it first launched its cloud services back in 2006. In February of last year, Amazon dropped its price for the 25th time. By April prices dropped for the 30th time and by the summer it was up to 37 times. Furthermore, there was a 37% drop in hourly costs for dedicated on-demand instances. Microsoft announced that they will follow AWS’s lead with regard to price cuts. I expect this trend to continue in 2014 and likely 2015. I highlight some of these price changes and the impact it will have on the market as more organizations embrace the public cloud in more detail in my eBook.
2. We’ll see signs of the shift to PaaS
Amazon is already starting to look more like a PaaS provider than an IaaS provider. Just consider pre-packaged, pre-engineered features like Auto Scaling, CloudWatch, SQS, RDS among other services. An application hosted with AWS that uses all of these features looks more like an AWS application and less like a cloud application. Using proprietary features is very convenient, but don’t forget how application portability is impacted. I expect continued innovation in the PaaS market with new providers and technology, while downward price pressures in the IaaS market remain high. Could AWS (focusing on PaaS innovation) one day source its underlying infrastructure to a pure IaaS provider? This is my prediction for the long term — large telecoms like AT&T, Verizon, BT, et al. will eventually own the IaaS market, Amazon, Google, Microsoft will focus on PaaS innovation, and use infrastructure provided by those telecoms. This of course leaves room for startup, niche PaaS providers to build something innovative and leverage quality infrastructure delivered from the telecoms. This is already happening with smaller PaaS providers. Look for signs of this continuing in 2014.
3. “The cloud” will not be regulated
Recently, there have been rumblings of regulating “the cloud” especially in Europe, and that European clouds are safer than American clouds. If we stick with the concept that cloud computing is just another way of running IT (I call it the supply chain for IT service delivery), then the same old data classification and security rules apply. Only now, if you use cloud computing concepts, the need to classify and secure your data appropriately becomes more important. An attempt to regulate cloud computing would certainly have far reaching economic impacts. This is one to watch, but I don’t expect any legislative action to happen here in 2014.
4. More organizations will look to cloud as enabling DevOps
It’s relatively easy for developers to head out to the cloud, procure needed infrastructure, and get to work quickly. When developers behave like this, they not only write code and test new products, but they become the administrators of the platforms they own (all the way from underlying code to patching the OS) — development and operations come together. This becomes a bit stickier as things move to production, but the same concept can work (see prediction #5).
5. More organizations will be increasingly interested in governance as they build a DevOps culture
As developers can quickly bypass traditional procurement processes and controls, new governance concepts will be needed. Notice how I wrote “concepts” and not “controls.” Part of the new role of the IT department is to stay a step ahead of these movements, and offer developers new ways to govern their own platforms. For example, a real time chart showing used vs. budgeted resources will influence a department’s behavior much more effectively than a cold process that ends with “You’re over budget, you need to get approval from an SVP (expected wait time: 2-8 weeks).”
The numbers pictured are fictitious. With the concept of Service Owners, the owner of collaboration services can get a view of the applications and systems that provide the service. The owner can then see how VoIP spending is a little above the others, and drill down to see where resources are being spent (on people, processes, or technology). Different ITBM applications display these charts differently, but the premise is the same – real time visibility into spend. With cloud usage in general gaining steam, it is now possible to adjust the resources allocated to these services. With this type of information available to developers, it is possible to take proactive steps to avoid compromising the budget allocated to a particular application or service. On the same token, opportunities to make informed investments in certain areas will become exposed with this information.
So there you have it, my 2014 cloud predictions. What other predictions do you have?
To hear more from John, download his eBook “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” or his Whitepaper “Cloud Management, Now“
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Innovating in the Marketplace
“The DNA of the company has been all about innovation. Our CEO Thai Lee gets all the credit for really setting that foundation for the company and allowing us to go off and do market contributions like we’re doing with the cloud marketplace,” explained Richard Place, General Manager, Enterprise Solution Services, at SHI International, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Harness and Deliver Agility
“We see cloud and DevOps as two sides of the same coin. Often times operation folks have been focused on cloud computing as a way to deliver infrastructure in an agile fashion, but to make use of that infrastructure you need DevOps where you’re doing some of the process reengineering that allows applications to flow out of development and land somewhere,” explained Dave Roberts, Senior Director of Cloud Management at BMC Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
How SAP is refining its big data strategy
Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management
With SAP having focused on building up the HANA platform, it has been later to the game in articulating its Big Data strategy. Over the past few months, several important pieces fell into place. SAP announced the extension of Smart Data Access, its federated query technology, from Sybase to the HANA platform, and announced OEM deals with Hadoop platform providers Hortonworks and Intel.
This is still early days for both initiatives – for instance, the Smart Data Access technology, while well-established on Sybase, is still in its first release for HANA and Hadoop. While SAP isn’t alone in promoting federated query, extending it to HANA injects welcome realism into SAP’s data management strategy.
Venturing beyond in-memory
Until recently, SAP’s positioning of HANA emphasized its role as a destination platform for analytics and transaction-processing applications. SAP’s focus on HANA as both …
Forrester says on-premise will “revive” in 2014 despite SaaS surge
IT growth in 2014 will exceed 2013, but it will be another year until we see “strong” growth in the global tech market, according to the latest report from Forrester Research.
The paper, entitled ‘A Better But Still Subpar Global Tech Market In 2014 And 2015’, pretty much does what it says on the tin, predicting that business and government IT purchasing will increase 6.2% in US dollars in 2014, aside from purchases of telecommunications services.
This is a “distinctly better” return than 2013’s 1.6% growth according to Forrester’s Andrew Bartels, writing on the company’s official blog, who warned that even with 2015’s more impressive growth rate of 8.1% in US dollars, it will be a far cry from the “double digit” growth rates of the late 90s’ tech boom.
The global IT spending predictions are intriguing, but CloudTech readers’ interests will be …
Leveraging the Voice of the Crowd in the Cloud
As the significant benefits of SaaS and hybrid cloud services become more evident, it’s no surprise that organizations are moving more mission-critical applications – e.g., email, VoIP, online meetings, document storage/collaboration, etc., – to the cloud. This is different than CRM apps, which have been in the cloud for many years. If Salesforce.com is unavailable, the sales team is certainly impacted, but if email, IP, and/or VoIP communications are unavailable, the entire organization takes a productivity hit.
Moving your mission-critical apps to the cloud doesn’t absolve IT of responsibility for the quality of service though. If users can’t access email, they are not going to call Microsoft or Google or Amazon. They are going to call the IT help desk and the IT team will be expected to fix whatever problem exists.
Cloud Expo Names Cloud Computing Industry Leader Larry Carvalho Tech Chair
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Larry Carvalho has been named Tech Chair of Cloud Expo® 2014.
14th International Cloud Expo will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are excited that Larry Carvalho is joining us as Cloud Expo Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June will offer the best sessions and faculty to date,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “Since the 13th international conference in November we have received the highest number of sponsorship and exhibit inquiries for Cloud Expo 2014.”
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Harness and Deliver Agility
“We see cloud and DevOps as two sides of the same coin. Often times operation folks have been focused on cloud computing as a way to deliver infrastructure in an agile fashion, but to make use of that infrastructure you need DevOps where you’re doing some of the process reengineering that allows applications to flow out of development and land somewhere,” explained Dave Roberts, Senior Director of Cloud Management at BMC Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Expo Names Industry Thought Leader Vanessa Alvarez Conference Chair
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Vanessa Alvarez has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo® 2014.
14th International Cloud Expo will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are thrilled to see Vanessa Alvarez joining us as Cloud Expo conference chair. Our upcoming event in June will offer the best sessions and faculty to date,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “Since the 13th international conference in November, we have received the highest number of sponsorship and exhibit inquiries for Cloud Expo 2014.”