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Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts And Market Estimates, 2014

By 2018, CIOs expect it to play a critical role in enabling their organizations strategic vision according to IBM’s latest study, Moving from the back office to the front lines – CIO insights from the Global C-suite Study. The IBM study and recent cloud computing forecasts and market estimates illustrate how quickly CIOs’ roles are changing.

CIOs in high performance enterprises are increasingly seeing the world much more like their CEO counterparts.  Both are now focusing more on how cloud computing can improve customer engagement and operational performance while anticipating market and macro-economic factors.  IBM’s study provides a glimpse into their Institute for Business Value’s 1,600 face-to-face conversations with CIOs from 70 countries and 20 industries worldwide.

Here are the key take-aways from the report including an infographic summarizing key points of the study:

• Cloud computing has rapidly accelerated from 30% of CIOs mentioning it as a crucial technology for customer engagement in 2009 to 64% today.

• 67% of CIOs IBM interviewed are actively looking into how cloud technologies can better serve and collaborate with customers.

• 84% of CIOs are focusing on mobility solutions to support closer customer engagement, 83% are evaluating business analytics and optimization and 64%, cloud computing.   The following graphic shows a comparison of how priorities have changed between 2009 and 2013.

• CIOs in outperforming enterprises are nearly twice as likely as their peers (59% versus 31% for underperformers) to have a cohesive strategy for uniting the digital and physical elements of their businesses.  One respondent CIO from a banking firm in The Netherlands stated that “We want to create an integrated, 24/7 customer experience across channels and services.”  The following infographic summarizes key points of the analysis.

• Gartner’s latest edition of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service reports that Salesforce is the largest provider in the application PaaS (aPaaS) market with the fastest growing user base and application count.  Salesforce continues to accelerate the pace of innovation in the enterprise platform market with the Salesforce1 platform, which includes SDKs and API libraries specifically for mobile, service-oriented and Web application development, enhanced user experience, and advanced identity management,.  To read the full Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service please see the free reprint here.

• Cloud-related tech spending by businesses is forecast to triple from 2011 to 2017 according to IHS Technology.  By 2017, enterprise spending on cloud computing will amount to a projected $235.1B, triple the $78.2B spent in 2011 according to the research firm’s analysis.  In 2014, global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2B, up 20% from the amount spent in 2013. Source: Cloud- Related Spending by Businesses to Triple from 2011 to 2017.  

• Centaur Partners predicts that total SaaS revenue will shift from just over 10% of the total enterprise software market in 2010 to just over 16% by 2015, and predict that SaaS and cloud-based business application services revenue will have grown from $13.5B in 2011 to $32.8B in 2016.  The following graphic is from their latest SaaS Market Overview presentation.

• Forrester Research predicts that within the next 12 months more than 50% of enterprises will prioritize building private clouds by purchasing commercial software. Cisco has purchased reprint rights to The Forrester Wave™: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013 by Lauren E. Nelson, November 25, 2013.  The following is the Forrester Wave for Private Cloud Solutions, Q4, 13 courtesy of Cisco’s free download accessible here. Source: The Forrester Wave™: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013 by Lauren E. Nelson, November 25, 2013 Courtesy of Cisco.

• 42% of C-level executives are increasing their investments in cloud computing over the next twelve months according to Computerworld 2014 State of the Enterprise survey. You can view a summarized version of the presentation is here.  The following slide is from the summarized results showing budget predictions by technology area.

• Cloud applications will account for 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2018, compared to 82% at the end of 2013. Mobile cloud traffic will grow 12-fold from 2013 to 2018, attaining a compound annual growth rate of 64%. Source: Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013–2018.

• Bain & Company predicts that direct spending on hardware, software and services could top $70B by 2017 based on the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT).  The research brief, Is your company ready for the Internet of Things? predicts that companies that can capitalize on mobility, analytics and cloud computing will have the highest probability of success.  Bain & Company also presented their taxonomy of market growth by enterprise spending category below, projecting software and applications will generate $180B in sales by 2017.

• IDC is predicting that the cloud software market will surpass $75B by 2017 attaining a five year compound annual growth rate of 22% in the forecast period. IDC also found that current organizations using the cloud expect to spend 53.7% of their IT budget on cloud-based applications and platforms in the next 24 months.  Major benefits of the cloud for IT operations include reducing the size of the IT budget, improving IT staff productivity, and simplifying and standardizing IT infrastructure.  For other departments, benefits include improved resource utilization, enabling business units to control IT solutions more directly, and launch revenue generating services faster with more efficient time-to-market strategies. These findings are from the Cisco infographic based on IDC research data titled Midsize Enterprises Leading The Way With Cloud Adoption.

• The top three technologies that have the most potential for positive Return on Investment (ROI) are analytics and Big Data (65%), cloud computing (48%) and mobility (43%) according to the Accenture 2014 North America Digital Mining Survey.  88% C-suite and VP-level respondents to the survey believe that companies who do not embrace digitally-based strategies will lose their competitive position and face extinction. Source: Accenture 2014 North America Digital Mining Survey. The infographic of the results is shown below and can be found here.