North Bridge Venture Partners Future Of Cloud Computing Survey: SaaS Still The Dominant Cloud Platform
North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research released the results of their third annual Future Of Cloud Computing Survey today, providing a glimpse into cloud computing adoption trends, inhibitors and drivers of long-term growth.
This year’s survey included 855 respondents selected across business users, IT decision makers and cloud platform and application vendors. North Bridge and GigaOM Research report that a third of respondents are C-level executives in their organizations.
You can view a copy of the report results here from SlideShare.
The following are key take-aways from the report:
- Cloud adoption continued to rise in 2013, with 75% of those surveyed reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform – up from 67% last year. That growth is consistent with forecasts from GigaOM Research, which expects the total worldwide addressable market for cloud computing to reach $158.8B by 2014, an increase of 126.5% from 2011. The survey also shows significant growth is yet to come in SaaS adoption for business systems and IT management.
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- 63% of those surveyed report Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is in use in their companies, growing 15% over 2012. 45% are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) today, attaining a growth of 29% from last year. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is expected to grow the fastest over the next five years, with 72% of respondents saying they expect to use PaaS in their organizations.
- The survey results also included cloud segments and overall growth analysis forecasts from 451 Research Market Monitor Report. The graphic showing CAGRs by IaaS, PaaS and SaaS is shown below, with comparisons of 2012 results and 2016 market forecasts.
- 52% of organizations are using cloud-based applications to advance business priorities, compared with 36% that use applications that advance IT initiatives.
- CRM, marketing (including marketing automation) social business & collaboration and file sharing cloud-based applications are in use by more than 50% of all organizations in the sample.
- North Bridge Venture Partners reports that cloud investments by venture capitalists totaled $1.6B in 2010, increasing to $2.4B in 2011. Investments in 2012 dropped to $1.8B and through May, 2013, venture-based investments in cloud computing application and services providers totaled $281M. Subscription fee-based business models dominate with 77% of cloud vendors relying on this strategy.
- Gaining greater business agility (54.5%), scalability (54.3%) and cost (48%) are the three main drivers of cloud adoption today according to the survey results. Mobility was mentioned by 25% of respondents as a major driver for adopting cloud applications and platforms, behind cost.
- Security concerns (46%), vendor lock-in (35%), interoperability (27%), concerns over reliability (22.3%) and complexity (21%) are the top inhibitors to cloud adoption. Regulatory compliance (30%) and privacy (26%) are he next most frequently mentioned inhibitors to cloud computing adoption according to the survey.
- 39% expect to increase training, and 17% expect to hire outside resources as a result of increased cloud adoption.
- Amazon (14.3%), Microsoft (10.96%) and Google (7.88%) are the three most used cloud platforms by the organizations who responded to the survey.
