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• The global SaaS market is projected to grow from $49B in 2015 to $67B in 2018, attaining a CAGR of 8.14%.
• Global spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is expected to reach $16.5B this year, an increase of 32.8% from 2014.
• Cloud applications will account for 90% of worldwide mobile data traffic by 2019, compared to 81% at the end of last year.

These and other insights are from recent cloud computing forecasts and market estimates published by research and advisory consultancies including International Data Corporation (IDC), Forrester, Gartner, Ovum, Wikibon and others.

While the methodologies differ significantly, the findings from a recent Economist Intelligence Unit study provide the galvanizing thread across this diverse set of data.  The Economist found that the most mature enterprises are now turning to cloud strategies as a strategic platform for growing customer demand and expanding sales channels. The study found low-maturity or lagging cloud adopters focus on costs more than growth.

Key take-aways from the round-up are provided below:

• Globally, cloud apps will account for 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2019, compared to 81% at the end of last year. Mobile cloud traffic will grow 11-fold from 2014 to 2019, attaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60%. Source: Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2014–2019.

• 57% of IT architects and tech professionals are running apps on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform today.  Rightscale’s 2015 State of the Cloud Report found that AWS adoption is over 4X greater than Microsoft Azure IaaS and 5X that of Rackspace Public Cloud.  Rightscale found that AWS, Microsoft Azure IaaS, Azure PaaS, Rackspace Public Cloud and VMWare vCloud Air are the top five public cloud platforms used in enterprises today. Source: RightScale 2015 State Of The Cloud Report

• The global SaaS market is projected to grow from $49B in 2015 to $67B in 2018, attaining a CAGR of 8.14%. Global infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) spending globally is projected to grow from $23B in 2015 to $34B in 2018, attaining a CAGR of 10.27% in the forecast period.  Source: Technology Business Research presentation The Developer’s Coup: 2015 Applications Development Demands and Vendor Opportunities.

• The PaaS market will grow from $1.7B in 2014 to $68.3B by 2026, attaining a 36% CAGR according to Wikibon Research.  Overall, Salesforce.com (24%), Amazon (17%), and Microsoft (10%) are the leaders in PaaS  according to the Wikibon Research study.. Source: Wikibon Public Cloud Market Shares 2014 and 2015 by Ralph Finos – 29 August 2015.

• Goldman Sachs is forecasting the cloud infrastructure and platform market will grow at a 19.62% CAGR from 2015 to 2018, reaching $43B by 2018. Their recent market analysis also forecasts that the global market for cloud infrastructure and platforms will grow from $21B this year to $43B by the end of the forecast period.  Source:  How Big Can The Amazon Web Services Business Grow In The Future?

• AWS is used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers (57%) today. Rackspace is on par with AWS for its ability to fulfill customer IaaS needs and is the highest-rated IaaS provider for guaranteed SLAs, consistent with Rackspace’s new managed cloud positioning. Source: Amazon Web Services and VMware are Market Leaders in IaaS and On-Premises Cloud Platforms, Respectively, According to 451 Research’s Vendor Window.

• The more experienced an enterprise is with cloud computing the more likely they are to rely on cloud-based apps and platforms to boost customer demand strategies (50%). The Economist Intelligence Unit study (in conjunction with IBM) found that the most cloud-mature enterprises also invest the heaviest in expanding their sales channels (39%). Conversely low maturity enterprises are fixated on improving internal business-process efficiency (41%) and reducing costs and/or liabilities (38%). Source: Mapping the cloud maturity curve: Measuring organizational excellence in the new era of IT. (free, no opt-in, 19 pp.) .  The full study, Mapping The Cloud Maturity Curve, can be found here.

• Forrester’s Business Technographics data showed increased reported adoption of hosted private cloud for the US (5%), Canada (2%), and Germany (3%). Conversely, adoption decreased in the UK and France by 7% and 6%, respectively.  Source: Forrester Technographics. Adoption Profile: Hosted Private Cloud, North America and Europe, Q3 2014.

• 46% of surveyed firms in the European Union (EU) are using advanced cloud services relating to financial and accounting software applications, customer relationship management or to the use of computing power to run business applications. In 2014, almost twice as many firms used public cloud servers (12%) versus private cloud servers (7%). The following graphic illustrates the degree of dependence on cloud computing, by economic activity, EU-28, 2014. Source: Eurostat Statistics Explained.  Cloud computing – statistics on the use by enterprises.

• 64% of Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) are already using cloud-based apps, with average adoption being 3 apps.  78% of businesses indicate that they are considering purchasing new solutions in the next 2-3 years creating the potential to move the average number of applications used to 7, with 88% consuming at least one service.  Source: The small business revolution: trends in SMB cloud adoption.

• The Cloud Analytics Market is expected to grow from $7.5B in 2015 to $23.1B in 2020, attaining a CAGR of 25.1% during the forecast period. Source: Cloud Analytics Market worth $23.1 Billion by 2020.

• Global spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is expected to reach almost US$16.5B this year, an increase of 32.8% from 2014. Gartner projects the market will reach a 29.1% a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019, Source: Gartner Says Worldwide Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service Spending to Grow 32.8 Percent in 2015

• Worldwide spending on enterprise application software will grow 7.5% to reach $149.9B in 2015, increasing to more than $201B in 2019 with accelerating cloud adoption driving new software sales. Gartner’s analysis of enterprise software spending shows that alternative consumption models to traditional on-premises licenses are accounting for more than 50% of new software implementations; these include SaaS, hosted license, on-premises subscriptions and open source.  Gartner also predicts that by 2020, about a quarter of organizations in emerging regions will run their core CRM systems in the cloud, up from around 10 percent in 2012. Source: Gartner Says Modernization and Digital Transformation Projects Are Behind Growth in Enterprise Application Software Market.

• Public Cloud Services in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are projected to reach $386M in 2015 with SaaS being the largest area of spending (69.0%). Source: SaaS Will Take Nearly 70% of Public Cloud Market in CEE in 2015.

If your primary role within your organization is Operations, you likely realize the importance and significance of monitoring. The DevOps philosophy teaches us that measuring and collecting as much as possible is critical to not only the health of infrastructure, but it also plays a critical role in the architecting efforts of both software and hardware.

Jason Dixon of Librato knows this better than many and has made a career of helping others understand and implement the best tools and processes of successful monitoring. Known by many and first introduced to me as the “Graphite Guy”, Jason’s expertise goes far beyond his contributions to this and other open source projects.

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There once was a time when testers operated on their own, in isolation. They’d huddle as a group around the harsh glow of dozens of CRT monitors, clicking through GUIs and recording results. Anxiously, they’d wait for the developers in the other room to fix the bugs they found, yet they’d frequently leave the office disappointed as issues were filed away as non-critical. These teams would rarely interact, save for those scarce moments when a coder would wander in needing to reproduce a particularly finicky error.

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Last month, my partners in crime – Carmen DeArdo from Nationwide, Lee Reid, my colleague from IBM and I wrote a 3-part series of blog posts on DevOps.com. We titled our posts the Simple Math, Calculus and Art of DevOps. I would venture to say these are must-reads for any organization adopting DevOps. We examined all three ascpects – the Cultural, Automation and Process improvement side of DevOps. One of the key underlying themes of the three posts was the need for Cultural change – things like trust, collaboration, communication, etc. I will elaborate more on these soon.

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SCOPE is an acronym for Structured Computations Optimized for Parallel Execution, a declarative language for working with large-scale data. It is still under development at Microsoft. If you know SQL then working with SCOPE will be quite easy as SCOPE builds on SQL.
The execution environment is different from that RDBMS oriented data.

Data is still modeled as rows. Every row has typed columns and eveyr rowset has a well-defined schema. There is a SCOPe compiler that comes up with optimized execution plan and a runtime execution plan.

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Two thirds of respondents in a survey from Dimensional Research and Cloud Cruiser say they find it challenging to track cloud consumption for cost allocations.

The research, which quizzed IT professionals who attended the AWS Global Summit events in San Francisco and New York in April and July this year, found almost four in five (79%) are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy. Almost a third (30%) of respondents saying they will grow cloud services by more than half in the coming year, compared to 23% who said their company’s use of public cloud will increase by 25-50%. Only 9% said there would be no increase.

Of most interest is how organisations deploy hybrid clouds. At least 30% of respondents said they will complement their AWS cloud with another cloud. 31% said they planned on using an internal private cloud in addition to AWS, compared with 30% who opted for Microsoft. 27% said they did not plan on using any other cloud environments, while after Google (19%), the rest of the competition – Rackspace 9%, IBM SoftLayer 7%, Cisco 6% – lagged.

The majority of AWS usage is for software development and testing, cited by over 45% of respondents. Use for enterprise applications was cited by 35%, while more than one in five said they used AWS as a sandbox for testing other public cloud offerings.

Yet this balancing act comes at a cost. 61% of respondents admitted it would be of ‘high value’ to set alerts when public cloud consumption exceeded target, compared to only 2% of companies who said it would be of no value. In terms of cloud cost tracking, by application was the most popular according to two thirds of respondents, ahead of by project, by user, by department, and by VM.

In this instance it’s not so much a case of hidden costs, more of cutting them as necessary. “These findings tell us what we hear from our customers every day; budget tracking and forecasting is extremely difficult when you simply don’t know who is using what service, at what capacity level, much less the financial impact,” said Deirdre Mahon, Cloud Cruiser chief marketing officer.

“Making investments in the right solutions is critical even during the early stages of cloud adoption. Measure from the beginning and it will pay dividends when your bill comes in month after month,” she added.

At this point, you will be less than surprised to learn, Cloud Cruiser aligned this survey research with the release of a new product offering which tracks hybrid cloud usage by user and by cost, called CloudSmart-Now. Yet this is not an uncommon theory; regular readers of this publication will recall Springs.io in July, claimed to be the UK’s first pure-play container cloud service and offers billing based on actual usage rather than provisioned capacity.