Gartner describes iPaaS as:
“a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.”
Their Magic Quadrant, which can be downloaded courtesy of Mulesoft, defines
Service Description: What qualifies as a true Cloud service, iPaaS Functionality.
Use Cases and Buying Centers: iPaaS primarily addresses a need for Cloud Service Integration integrating on-premises applications and data, with SaaS and other Cloud services.
Market Trends: Gartner has identified at least 30 iPaaS vendors and anticipates a highly competitive market, with key growth sectors like IoT Integrations

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In the Gartner white paper Taming the Digital Dragon, they define the Hybrid Cloud model as an enabling blueprint for digital transformation and leadership.
They give it such an elaborate name because their definition goes far beyond the normal industry use of the term, a mix of on-premise and public Cloud computing, whereas Gartner instead defines a Hybrid Cloud business model.

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Cloud enables IT agility, empowers DevOps teams and helps to transform legacy business models. The fifth annual Future of Cloud Computing survey investigates key trends in corporate cloud usage. This year’s insightful survey findings offer perspective from cloud service practitioners across all industry sectors.

“Cloud has been gaining momentum year­-over-­year since the Future of Cloud Computing survey was launched five years ago. Looking at the adoption rates and trends at such a detailed level, it’s undeniable that the most successful technology leaders of today and tomorrow are scaling in the cloud,” said Jim Moran, General Partner at North Bridge.

“Last year, we discussed the second cloud front and the rise of cloud­-native companies. This year, we’re seeing the pervasiveness of cloud disrupt industries across the board as companies look to maximize and implement cloud as a strategic and integral technology,” Moran added.

“We’re also seeing the emergence of the cloud as the only way businesses can truly get more out of their data including analysing and executing on it in real-­time. This will be a huge opportunity, but as the survey showed, because data rarely moves between clouds companies must first learn how to interconnect disparate data sources into new applications.”

Savvy business leaders are no longer debating whether or not to use cloud, but how pervasively they will use it in their digital transformation plans. The latest survey results highlight record levels of corporate adoption of cloud computing, both for business functions and in areas such as content management and application development in the cloud.

Even the most traditional IT teams are finally evolving. Some are taking back technology strategy from the forward­-looking line of business leaders that led the way to progress. Therefore, North Bridge believes that digital technologies – delivered from the cloud – are becoming differentiating factors for more businesses.

Cloud is the business transformation catalyst

• Significant processing, systems of engagement and systems of insight are moving to the cloud ­­– 81.3 percent of sales and marketing, 79.9 percent of business analytics, 79.1 percent of customer service and 73.5 percent of HR & Payroll activities have already transitioned to the cloud.
• IT is moving significant processing to the cloud with 85.9 percent of web content management, 82.7 percent of communications, 80 percent of app development and 78.9 percent of disaster recovery now clou­d-based.
• While business users have been a fan of cloud’s ease of use, accessibility and scalability since 2011, the importance of cloud agility has jumped from fourth to second in importance within five years.
• Among all survey respondents, the top inhibitors to cloud adoption are security (45.2%), regulatory/compliance (36%), privacy (28.7%), vendor lock-­in (25.8%) and complexity (23.1%).
• Concerns regarding interoperability and reliability have fallen off significantly since 2011 (15.7% and 9.9% respectively in 2015). However, the cost of cloud services are now three times as likely to be a concern today, versus five years ago.

Raised expectations for public and hybrid cloud

• Today, three quarters of company data in significant volumes is living in private or public clouds. However, company data in hybrid cloud systems is forecast to double over the next two years.
• Corporate cloud computing strategies are focusing on public (up 43.3%) and hybrid (up 19.2%) while private cloud has taken a significant back seat in comparison (down by 48.4%).
• SaaS is the most pervasive cloud technology used today with a presence in 77.3 percent of all organizations, an increase of 9 percent since 2014.
• Accordingly, ROI expectations are high with 78 percent expecting to see results within three months. Fifty eight percent expect ROI in less than three months for PaaS services.
• Among users taking the survey, the biggest factors preventing use of public cloud offerings are security (38.6%), privacy (29.8%) and expertise (22.8%). Regardless, the outlook for ongoing cloud service adoption is very bright.

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As we look forward to 2016, there is a lot to reflect on and forecast in cloud. Below you will find my top predictions for the year ahead.

RIP private cloud

The biggest missed story of 2015 has been the profound failure of the private cloud.

Just a few years ago, the private cloud was IT’s solution to remaining relevant to their business partners. I remember attending OpenStack Boston 2011 at the height of the private cloud movement, where everyone seemed convinced of the inevitability of the self-managed private cloud. But after years of incredible innovation in the public cloud and disarray in private cloud, 2016 will be the year that the private cloud as a primary strategy will finally go to its grave.

I expect some big shake ups in the private cloud, especially in the OpenStack community. Unless the private cloud substantially changes its pace of innovation, it will become a speed bump for enterprises on their way into the public cloud.

Google still doesn’t figure it out

If there was ever a company that should own the public cloud, it would be Google. They were building cutting-edge cloud infrastructure while the rest of us were still talking about our type 1 hypervisors. They even introduced the term “cloud computing” into our lexicon. I don’t know about you, but with the exception of a handful of mobile companies that built their businesses on AppEngine, I rarely run into a Google cloud customer.

While I believe Google has the vision, financial resources, and technical capacity to be a top cloud provider, I predict they will continue to lose more ground in 2016. To take liberty with the famous Wayne Gretzky quote, in the process to skating to where Google thinks the puck will be, companies like Amazon and Microsoft are busy putting the puck in the net.

Hybrid cloud hype unleashed

Recent industry news would make it hard not to predict 2016 to be the year of the hybrid cloud. But before doing this, let’s remind ourselves of the last year of the hybrid cloud: 2012. Back then industry experts were predicting the hybrid cloud to be the future of enterprise cloud computing, with the private cloud as the foundation and the public cloud used for bursting and new/unproven workloads. So with this historical reminder, I predict 2016 to be the year of the hybrid cloud hype, where products rebrand themselves as powering and/or enabling the hybrid cloud, and container hype reaches new heights. Expect legacy data centre and virtualisation products to attempt to breath new life into their ageing product lines with the term “hybrid cloud”, and existing public cloud vendors to reach into the data center to get a little of the hybrid shine. Ultimately, hybrid cloud is essentially the toll booth on the way to the public cloud.

End of shadow IT

Public cloud adoption in the enterprise was fuelled, to a large extent, by shadow IT – effectively “rogue” lines of business that worked around their slow-moving IT departments. With shadow IT, enterprises indirectly embraced an incredible amount of innovation in SaaS, cloud computing, mobile, and open source. This innovation has come at a risk to the business, since it typically worked around the IT business policies put in place to mitigate risks.

I predict 2016 to be the end of shadow IT. Two things have changed. IT has embraced and provided leadership in many of the disruptive changes they ignored over the last several years, and enterprises desperately need a lean and agile IT again to help propel their businesses through the current state of technology turmoil. The resurgence of enterprise IT will drive changes in product functionality and how vendors market, sell, price and deliver their services.

Cloud automation goes mainstream

We saw the emergence of business-level automation of the cloud with products from companies like VMTurbo and ourselves. This emerging market is being driven by what I call the “complexity gap”, where the complexity of the building and managing cloud infrastructure is outpacing the ability of management software and services to contain this complexity.

The future of the cloud will not be DevOps engineers writing low-level scripts to automate parts of our infrastructure. Instead it will be business-level automation, with enterprises inputting the policies by which they want their business systems managed and smart software executing these policies in support of the business. I predict 2016 to be the year business-level automation of the cloud goes mainstream.

Telecom makes big moves in the cloud

I think telecom companies will finally make big moves in the cloud…no, just kidding. Remember everyone predicting telecom providers would be the real winners in the cloud? Glad we can finally put this one to bed.

The future of data centers looks very exciting. Data Centers are turning out to be increasingly important in today’s connected world as we can store and process a lot of consumer and commercial data. Data centers seem to be either becoming huge or very small. In general, marketing cloud storage and cloud computing services are likely to increase the profit margins and favor the large players. There is an increasing need for superior Data center competence as we are more dependent on cloud-based applications and huge Data center services.

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It’s never easy to predict the future. But if you want to plan for the future, you need to keep an eye on what’s coming next.

This month, we reached out to people from different areas of the software industry to get their thoughts on what to expect in 2016.
From DevOps to automation, security, and open API – these experts discuss new and continuing developments, changes, and trends that will impact that software industry in 2016.
Here are thirteen software industry predictions.

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The recent uptick in cyber attacks across all sectors of the economy, have reinforced for CIOs the need to be able to address corporate boards and customers on their strategies for protection and resilience for the coming 2016 year.

Cloud, Big Data, and the liability issues in the news, have exposed the increased both the virtual, legal and physical risk bases and attack surfaces related to cloud and cyber. More than ever, formulating strategic and tactical defenses against adapting and evolving threats requires both a business and technological viewpoints. With external attacks, ransomware, and potential malicious insiders, CIOs and CISOs are faced with unprecedented challenges that require updating and re-thinking security policies, cyber hygiene, and technology migrations.

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