Alan Kay’s saying that the best way to predict the future is to create it resonates through the best cloud computing and enterprise software predictions for 2014. Constraints that held start-ups back from delivering sophisticated new apps and services are disappearing fast. The dynamics of one of my favorite books, The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, are in full force across the cloud and enterprise landscape.
There are many predictions being generated right now and instead of writing yet another set, I’m providing a listing of those that are the most interesting and thought-provoking. They are listed below:
10 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2014 – In-depth analysis of ten predictions including how more companies will realize they are really in the software business, private cloud computing having a moment of truth and continued adoption of cloud brokerages. This set of predictions is an interesting read and provides useful insight. I’d just add that as application developers go, so goes an industry, a point Bernard Golden refers to in this post.
Analytics Eats the World in 2014 – George Mathew of Alteryx is one of the most driven people I’ve ever met about analytics programming and development. He’s very focused on breaking down constraints that hold analysts back from getting more value from their data. His predictions provide insight into how business analysts’ roles are changing based on rapid advances in analytics app development, model development and use.
Changing Cloud Scapes in 2014 – Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies provides ten insightful predictions regarding the continued adoption of cloud computing platforms in the enterprise. His fourth prediction, “Although horizontal cloud solutions will continue to experience significant growth, vertical market solutions aimed at specific industries will grow even more rapidly” is starting to emerge today. The recent success of Veeva Systems supports his prediction and points to next year seeing more vertical market solutions being successfully launched.
Cloud computing experts forecast the market climate in 2014 – Excellent summary of seven cloud computer experts’ predictions for 2014 including Mark Eisenberg, Roger Jennings, Paul Korzeniowski, David S. Linthicum, Tom Nolle, Dan Sullivan and Mark Szynaka. Highlights include IDC analysts predicting the “Over the 2013 to 2017 forecast period, public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of 23.5%, five times that of the IT industry as a whole,” and PaaS will lead IaaS and SaaS with a CAGR of 29.7%. What’s useful about these set of predictions is the breadth of expertise reflected in market statistics, market and technology projections and insights shared.
Cloud Computing Predictions for 2014: Cloud Joins The Formal IT Portfolio – James Staten of Forrester Research has compiled an excellent series of predictions for the year with emphasis on security and SaaS becoming the de facto choice for new applications. While he hasn’t quoted adoption figures of SaaS relative to on-premise, he does point out that Forrester believes HCM, CRM and collaboration will be the leading categories of SaaS apps in 2014.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014 – Gartner is predicting that the top ten strategic technology trends for 2014 include mobile device diversity and management, mobile apps and applications, the Internet of Everything (IoE), Hybrid Cloud and IT as a Service Broker, Cloud/Client Architecture, The Era of Personal Cloud, 3D-Printing, Cloud-Scale IT and several others.
My One Big Fat Cloud Computing Prediction for 2014 – I have been following the industry analysis, writing and research of Joe McKendrick for years based on the excellent insight he provides. Joe predicts that cloud computing is set to become mainstream computing, period. He cites Cisco’s research showing the majority of data center will be cloud-based and shares his perspective of the market. Joe has an innate sense of how enterprises adopt and use technology and this post reflects that expertise.
SaaS predictions for 2014 – Chris Kanaracus is predicting that multitenancy will fade away as a major concern in SaaS, geographic depth of coverage will accelerate with cloud vendors announcing new data center openings around the world, and more vertical market adoption of SaaS. He also prefaces his predictions with the Gartner forecast for SaaS (software as a service) quoting their figures of the total market will toping $22 billion through 2015, up from more than $14 billion in 2012.
Top Predictions about Software Companies in 2014 – In-depth analysis and predictions of which companies are going to be the most interesting to watch in 2014 and predictions regarding the enterprise software landscape. This post provides a great overview of how industry veterans see enterprise software changing as a result of cloud computing as well.
Troubling, Challenging 2014 ERP Predictions – Brian Sommer’s predictions are the most thought-provoking and honest of any written so far this year. He writes “for an ERP vendor to sell CX (customer experience) software and then mistreat their own customers so badly is more than ironic (or moronic). It’s a death wish. Yet, it happens.” If there is only one set of predictions you read from this list, be sure to read this set.
What Should CMOs Do In 2014? IDC’s Top Ten Predictions – Gil Press provides in-depth analysis of IDC’s predictions of how the role of CMO will change in 2014. He’s summarized the key points of the recent webinar including market forecasts from IDC, providing his insight and expertise in this post. IDC is predicting that digital marketing investment will exceed 50% of total program budget by 2016, up from 39% in 2013 and that by the end of 2014, 60% of CMOs will have a formal recruiting process for marketers with data skills.
The five highest-performing cloud computing stocks as of Q3, 2013 in the Cloud Computing Stock Index have proven prowess in closing enterprise-level deals, expertise in compliance and security, and years of infrastructure experience.
Twelve of the nineteen companies in the index delivered a positive return in the first three quarters of this year. NetSuite (NYSE:N) leads all companies in the index with an annualized gain as of calendar Q3 of 88.69% and has a dollar value of $16,078 on $10,000 invested on January 2nd of this year. Workday (NYSE:WDAY) attained an annualized gain of 81.49% as of Q3, and has a dollar value of $15,617 on $10,000 invested on January 2nd. Qualys (NASDAQ: QLYS) attained an annualized gain of 49.33% and delivered $13,498 on $10,000 invested from January 2nd to October 2nd of this year. The following table lists the top best performing cloud computing stocks in the index.
Best Performing
Worst Performing
Seven of the nineteen companies in the index lost value, with Fusion-IO (NYSE:FIO) experiencing the greatest annualized loss in stock value of -51.03% and $10,000 invested on January 2nd of this year being worth $5,862 as of October 2nd. Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) had an annualized loss of -38.61%, with $10,000 invested on January 2nd being worth $6,943 as of October 2nd. The following table shows the five lowest-performing cloud computing stocks in the index.
The nineteen companies that comprise the Cloud Computing Stock Index attained a 19.41% return from October 3, 2012 to October 2, 2013. In the same period Microsoft gained 13.98%, Oracle, 7.05% and SAP, 4.83%. Please click on the index to expand it for easier viewing.
Specifics on the Cloud Computing Stock Index
I used The Cloud Times 100 as the basis of the index, selecting nineteen companies all of which are publically traded. The latest edition of the Cloud Computing Stock Index is shown here. The filter applied to these companies is that 50% or more of their revenues are generated from cloud-based applications, infrastructure and services. Please click on the index for easier viewing.
Note: I do not hold equity positions or work for any of the companies mentioned in this blog post or included in the Cloud Computing Stock Index.
Enterprises are defining their own cloud strategies, their own way, ignoring vendor hype and requiring metrics that reflect security (61%), mean-time-to-recover from outages (57%), number of data center outages (51%).
What’s refreshing about 451 Group’s conferences is that each of their companies including 451 Research, Uptime Institute, and Yankee Group rely on solid methodologies to research their coverage areas and markets. This results in presentations that are packed with insight and are based on a solid foundation of interviews and research. I had a chance to catch up with SoftLayer’s Lance Crosby, Simon West and Andre Fuochi for an update on how the IBM acquisition is going, which is summarized in this post as well. The slides shown are from Michelle Bailey, Vice President, Datacenter Initiatives and Digital Infrastructure’s excellent presentation given at the conference.
The following are the key take-aways from the summit:
Enterprises are defining their own cloud strategies, their own way, ignoring vendor hype and requiring metrics that reflect security (61%), mean-time-to-recover from outages (57%), number of data center outages (51%). When asked which metrics beyond Service Level Agreements (SLAs) service providers should report, respondents to the 451 Research survey provided the following insights, shown below:
The top three SaaS applications in two years will be for the enterprise, business support, and database platforms per 451 Research’s latest survey:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) growth is critical to off-premises hosting deployments succeeding in the next two years, as the following graphic illustrates:
80%of enterprises would experience a severe impact to their operations if there was a cloud outage of just a day which make security and availability must-haves for any hosting and cloud services provider. The following graphic breaks down the impact of service provider outage by time:
Worldwide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is projected to grow from $4.475B in 2013 to $10.23B in 2016, with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) growing from $2.23B in 2013 to $5.24B in 2016. The following slide provides a breakout of forecast categories by hosting and cloud business categories:
Why Enterprises Need A Digital Infrastructure Playbook
The focal point of the summit was the launch of the digital infrastructure playbook. Tony Bishop, Chief Strategy Officer, The 451 Group introduced the Digital Enterprise Playbook Series which you can download here. His presentation provided insights into how enterprises are struggling to align legacy IT, infrastructure including data centers, cloud, applications and system management to business goals while becoming more agile.
I had a chance to speak with Tony after his presentation and asked him why enterprises need a digital infrastructure playbook now. “Digital transformation is breaking down the barriers to sustainable global prosperity by shifting power towards the individual,” he said. “This revolution will transform how enterprises create and deliver value. Digital enterprises will pursue and build dynamic infrastructure capabilities to innovate and differentiate customer experience, constantly empower employees and disseminate prescriptive knowledge across the enterprise.”
One of the most passionate and knowledgeable people I’ve ever met in infrastructure and IT research is Martin McCarthy, Chairman and CEO, The 451 Group. He told me he’s seeing more pressure than ever for edge-to-core integration in the enterprise, which is forcing CIOs to be strategists over experts in cost reduction. “Digital infrastructure will be the backbone enabling enterprise transformation in coming years. To blaze this trail, organizations need an ‘edge to core’ digital infrastructure playbook,” he said. Presented below is a page from the Digital Enterprise Playbook Series:
IBM SoftLayer Update
IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is going excellently and many IBM divisions now are actively collaborating with the Softlayer team to migrate existing apps and develop new ones. Thank you Lance Crosby, Simon West and Andre Fuochi for the update provided at the conference, it was invaluable.
Softlayer will be the foundation for a global cloud services infrastructure capable of delivering applications across multiple continents and thousands of users within hours, not days. Lance Crosby explained the vision IBM has of delivering a continual stream of new applications and services over the global cloud services infrastructure network, which has the potential to turn into a high margin business quickly.
Softlayer is assisting with making the IBM Request for Proposal (RFP) more efficient based on their deep expertise in this critical area. Based on personal experience it can take anywhere from several weeks to up to several months for an RFP response. SoftLayer has devised processes and systems that make RFP response times a fraction of that.
The majority of the top ten customers Softlayer has today are running large-scale clusters of Hadoop, with 40 Hadoop clusters being commonplace. Lance Crosby mentioned these customers are very sophisticated in their use of Hadoop and many of them are in consumer products companies, looking to gain greater insights into customer behavior.
Bare metal servers running Hadoop are one of the fastest growing areas of the Softlayer business right now. Simon West made an excellent point that running Hadoop on bare metal servers instead of through virtualized environment leads to a higher level of throughput, given Softlayer’s internal testing results. Bare metal servers continue to accelerate in the industry and Softlayer’s executives confirmed they are seeing an acceleration of demand in this area.
An additional six data centers are planned for 2014, and SoftLayer has the capability to build one data center every two months of needed. When asked what the global expansion plans are for SoftLayer since the acquisition, Lance Crosby told me London and Germany are of primary interest. He also added that whenever the demand for a given nation reached between four and five thousand servers, Softlayer and IBM will consider building a data center in-country.
IDG Enterprise recently published Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report, showing how enterprises continue to struggle with security, integration and governance while finding immediate value in collaboration and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
IDG’s methodology is based on interviews with 1,358 respondents, stratified across CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld, and Network World websites, in addition to respondents contacted via email, and LinkedIn forums. 58% of respondents are from executive IT roles; 17% from Mid-level IT; 14% from IT professionals; 8% from middle-level business management and 3% non-manager roles were represented in the study. High tech industries are the dominant industry represented with 18% of respondents, followed by financial services, government and manufacturing (each accounting for 10% of respondents). Education (9%) and telecommunications & utilities (6%) are the other industries represented.
Key take-aways from the survey include the following:
49% of executive-level management see cloud computing as transformational to their business strategies. 40% are currently having their IT staff investigate the potential of cloud computing contributing to their businesses, 5% don’t see cloud as an option and 6% aren’t sure.
Amazon (32%), Microsoft (23%) and Google (20%) are most often considered thought leaders in the field of cloud computing by respondents to the IDG survey.
Enabling business continuity (43%), greater flexibility to react to changing market conditions (40%), speed of deployment (39%) and improving customer support or services (38%) are the top four drivers of investment in cloud computing technology according to the survey. The following graphic provides an analysis of each driver by level of relative importance. This image is from Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report.
Accelerating business value by providing access to critical business data and applications (56%); serving as a catalyst of IT innovation (56%); enabling greater employee collaboration (54%); and enabling greater levels of IT agility (54%) are the top four benefits enterprises are gaining from cloud-based applications. The following graphic provides an analysis of how cloud computing technology is impacting each of the areas shown in respondent’s enterprises. This image is from Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report.
Financial Services and high tech companies are projected to have the largest cloud computing budgets based on the survey. Enterprises are expected to invest an average of $1.5M in cloud-based services during the 2013 – 2014 timeframe. IDG projects that large companies will spend $2.8M relative to small and medium-sized businesses investing $486K on average.
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) (35%) are the hardest to convince regarding the value of cloud computing, followed by the board of directors or equivalent (24%), the CEO (24%), and the Chief Operating Officer (COO) (16%) third. Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) are the easiest to convince, with just 6% of respondents mentioning this group of executives being a challenge to convince regarding the value of cloud computing.
The percentage of organizational IT budgets allocated to SaaS increased from 8% in 2012 to 13% in 2013 according to the last two IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing surveys. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) increased to 10% of overall IT budgets, up from 7% in 2012. In aggregate, 44% of IT budgets are spent on cloud computing today, increasing to 51% by 2015 in the base of enterprises interviewed for the study.
Enterprises continue to migrate applications to the cloud that increase collaboration and enhance customer relationships first. Collaboration and conferencing solutions (38%), e-mail and messaging (35%) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)/Sales Force Automation (SFA) (27%) are the top three applications being migrated to the cloud in the enterprises surveyed. The following graphic shows which applications are moving to the cloud today and the plans for migrating applications in the next 12 months, and over the next 1 to 3 years. This image is from Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report.
59% of enterprises are still identifying which IT operations are the best candidates for cloud hosting. 33% have identified all IT operations that they are comfortable having hosted in the cloud, given the current security of cloud infrastructure and application design.
The three most important factors in selecting a SaaS application provider include the ability to configure and customize the cloud application to meet specific business needs (40%), consistent cloud application performance and availability (38%) and security certification and practices of the SaaS provider (34%).
61% of enterprises have at least one application that is cloud-based in their organizations today. This increased from 57% in 2012. 24% of enterprises are planning to implement cloud applications in the next 12 months and 15% are planning to between 1 to three years from now.
In enterprises with less than 1,000 employees, CEOs (52%) are the most influential role in cloud purchasing, followed by the CIO (39%) and IT/networking staff (33%). In enterprises over 1,000 employees, the CIO (60%), followed by the IT/networking management (47%) and CTO or IT network architect (45%) are the three most influential roles in the cloud purchasing process.
42% of cloud-based projects are eventually brought back in-house, with security concerns (65%), technical/oversight problems (64%), and the need for standardization (on one platform) (48%) being the top three reasons why.
The top three challenges to implementing a successful cloud strategy in enterprise vary significantly between IT and line-of-business (LOB). For IT, concerns regarding security (66%), integration stability and reliability (47%) and ability of cloud computing solutions to meet enterprise/industry standards (35%) challenge adoption. The following table compares the perceptions of IT and line-of-business leaders. This image is from Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report.
The value and variety of online cloud computing programs being offered by leading colleges and universities is proliferating.
Focusing on the learning needs of IT professionals who need to apply cloud technologies to solve complex business problems, many of these programs and courses sell out before classes begin. This is because CIOs’ career paths are increasingly defined by how well they apply cloud technologies to the unique challenges and problems their businesses face. For CIOs and other members of senior management, getting a solid education on cloud computing’s business benefits is essential for managing effectively today, increasing their long-term marketability and career growth.
These programs are designed for C-level executives and senior managers to get up to speed quickly, often including guest CEOs of prominent software companies as part of the curriculum. Stanford’s course offered this fall online and on campus has five different CEO guest speakers including Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net for example. These programs have an entirely different set of learning objectives versus certifications. For an excellent analysis of cloud certifications please see David Linthicum’s recent post Are you on the right cloud computing career path? Also excluded are vendor-sponsored certification programs as the intent of many of these is to promote a very specific view of cloud computing that aligns with their product and service strategies.
Here are key take-aways from following this area:
Georgia Institute of Technology is partnering with Coursera, offering Health Informatics in the Cloud, beginning on September 16th for free. Coursera is an education company that partners with many of the worlds’ leading colleges and universities to offer free online courses to anyone, anywhere. They have partnered with 62 universities in 16 countries and offer over 300 courses as of today.
University of California, Berkeley is partnering with EdX offering Software as a Service (CS169.2X) beginning August 13th for free. MIT and Harvard partnered to create EdX, a non-profit organization that is committed to bringing the best of higher education to students around the world. EdX offers MOOCs (massive open online courses) in addition to interactive online courses in the subject areas of law, history, science, engineering, business, social sciences, computer science, public health, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Stanford University’s CS309A looks like one of the best being offered this fall, with five different CEO guest speakers including Hamish Brewer, JDA Software; Godfrey Sulliva, Splunk; Bob Beardon, Horton Works; and Aaron Levie, Box.net.Dr. Timothy Chou, former president of Oracle OnDemand and Lecturer at Stanford University for over three decades is teaching the course.
The following is a comparison of the cloud computing courses and programs designed for senior management starting this fall. Those entries in green are the free courses that take just minutes to enroll in. Please click on the image to expand it for easier reading.
The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions. And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.
Gaining a clear, contextually-based view of customers isn’t easy. Fine-tuning system integration to understand the nuances of customers, gain greater insights and infusing customer intelligence through a company requires more than APIs and cloud platform integration. It requires a precise strategy of integration to align customer data to ongoing strategies.
The bottom line is that customer-driven integration is reshaping CRM and will accelerate as cloud platforms, combined with APIs, reorder the customer relationship landscape.
Key take-aways from my interview with them include the following:
Cloud integration is one of the fastest growing areas of enterprise software today, made more complex by cloud platform providers creating their own unique approaches to APIs. What are the top three lessons you’ve learned navigating Scribe through the many potential product and services strategies cloud platforms are providing today?
The top that come to mind are understanding that your cloud platform vendor absolutely affects your product offering and making sure your offering is portable, that you’re not too deep in one vendor’s technology or platform.
There are a many new cloud services and platforms – you have to make a choice between an established, proven vendor or taking a chance as an early adopter of something new. We decided to be an early adopter and we’ve had mixed results, which at times caused problems for our customers. Customers don’t care who caused your slowdown or outage – they expect that you have service available no matter what. As a result, we had to build out sophisticated and sensitive monitors, fail-over and availability capacity.
One of the things we did, and it was fairly controversial at Scribe, was make sure our offering was highly portable. Given the vendor’s brand name, there were people who felt that there was no way something could go wrong and we were showing a vote of no confidence by not completely embracing the service. Others at Scribe were skeptical and insisted we not get too deep into this particular technology so we could pull the plug quickly if it didn’t work out. Even though it was not a popular decision, we made sure this portability was part of our architecture from day one and we’ve resisted getting too dependent on unique capabilities even though it could be easier from a development standpoint.
Keeping that discipline turned out to be a very smart move – we’ve since had to move parts of our offering to other platforms and services that could better accommodate our growth and capacity needs. As we compare notes with other integration companies with cloud offerings, we’re hearing similar stories. We want to focus on our features and services and we want to be able to make sure our platform is stable and performing for our customers. Having the ability to move parts and pieces of our architecture when we need to is critical as we grow. Our planning and roadmap now include a capacity review and all options are on the table, including changing technology platforms or vendors.
Many say enterprise software is quickly moving in the direction of an API economy. What are your thoughts on the API economy beginning with how you define it, and how will it change CRM in the next three years?
When we look at the enterprise software space and how it is still very challenging to integrate the data across these applications, it absolutely makes sense directionally. There are so many new technology stacks and platforms out there and the old ones aren’t going away either. APIs are a logical framework for people to access, share, and integrate data regardless of where it lives or how it’s stored.
This is really exciting for CRM. There is a lot of talk about the 360 degree view of the customer but the reality for most businesses is that actually getting all that data is still difficult and not standardized. If you’ve got a lightweight API to access any number of customer data points in and outside the business, CRM would be more a framework and platform to select and mash up those data feeds in a tailored presentation for particular roles in your business – sales, support, marketing, etc. You could put a very powerful, functionally relevant view of the customer at your employee’s fingertips. We’re already seeing that today with the ability to embed Google Maps, social feeds, and the like in CRM. But think about how incredible it could be for CRM if you were able to do that type of embed with virtually any data source.
In such a highly competitive, rapidly changing and technically complex market area, how do you continually innovate and generate new ideas?
The best way to describe how we innovate is that we take a clean sheet of paper approach when thinking about product. Our product team typically looks at the business problem first and gets very creative about how to achieve the desired outcome. We also take a hard look at the status quo and challenge “how can we do this completely different and better”? Our goal is to delight our partners and customers with product that they find easy to use and that gets the job done without a lot of hassle or drama. Sometimes it takes an unusual path and it typically isn’t your big, trendy items. For instance, most integration projects require a team of people to accomplish – experts in data, experts in business process, usually an outside consultant or professional services vendor. One of the things we heard in passing was what a pain in the neck it was to manage multiple clients and getting permission from the client’s IT organization to access the integration environment – one of those things you just talk about as an accepted pain of doing business. In response, our product team brought in social features like the ability to invite or de-invite members to a specific customer organization and allowing the owner of that customer organization to set permissions of what that member could do in their organization. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t seem like a big deal but today, that social user experience really excites our customers and partners and it’s become a key differentiator for Scribe.
For many enterprise software companies, selling through resellers is challenging. What key lessons has Scribe learned about making a reseller strategy for cloud integration services successful?
We’ve been selling through the channel for a long time now – understanding their business model and supporting their success is paramount to us as a business. Partners are all about standardization, efficiency, quality, and repeatability at scale – you need to be oriented to that outcome whether it’s product, programs, pricing, communications, or support. Who you are and what you provide needs to be consistent and fair to the entire community.
Our motto is “own the customer, respect the partner”. When we’re servicing a customer directly, we are very cognizant of the partner and we know that customer’s experience with Scribe can directly impact their relationship with that partner. You have to weigh your interactions with a customer against the whole of your partner relationship and calibrate accordingly. So we make sure that we give our customers the same touch and quality service as our partners. Your reputation with your partners and that partner community will dictate your success in the channel. You have a great reputation with your partners and you’ve got their back – they are going to reward you by being incredibly loyal. The top reason we hear from prospective partners looking to make a switch is “this vendor was really difficult to work with” or “this vendor failed in delivering to my customer and I need something now to get this customer back on track”.
The growth of the API economy has many parallels to growing a reseller-based business. How do you view these parallels and how do they open up greater avenues of innovation to benefit those companies using CRM today and in the future through resellers?
Where we see a distinct parallel is taking hold of a something like data or an application, and evolving it into a completely new and innovative offering, which completely transforms the experience of using it – for the better. With APIs it’s about evolving connectivity and access. In CRM, the most successful resellers reinvent the CRM application as a platform. They craft entirely new solutions on CRM that are imbued with their particular expertise in a vertical or a set of business processes that make CRM much more straightforward and easier to use. Often these offerings are unrecognizable from the original CRM. This innovation benefits business customers as the reseller is productizing their expertise and making CRM much more turnkey for them. At the end of the day, it isn’t about the particular CRM vendor or platform but more about the particular capabilities that a reseller has in their turnkey CRM offering. That’s a huge benefit to customers as they’re now able to focus on picking the right reseller and their expertise to help their business versus being distracted and consumed with the nuts and bolts of hand-tailoring the CRM application to fit their needs. What are you seeing in terms of on-premise to cloud migration on the part of resellers? Are they bringing you more deals that are cloud-based versus on-premise? Does this vary between North America and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East & Africa)?
The reseller channel is going through an interesting evolution with cloud. What we’re seeing are resellers typically making two choices, going cloud or sticking with on-premise but focusing on larger, enterprise deals. We’re seeing some of our existing resellers re-aligning their offerings and services around cloud; they may continue to do premise deals but they aren’t leading with premise. We’re increasingly working with a third category of new partners who have entered the CRM business recently as exclusively cloud; typically these resellers represent multiple CRM vendors (Salesforce, Sugar, Dynamics CRM Online, etc.) in their practice.
Regardless of the partner orientation towards cloud, we are definitely seeing a shift towards cloud deals. EMEA is behind North America but is quickly closing the gap – we see growing adoption of cloud applications and there is an excitement and interest in EMEA for more cloud.
Can you walk me through the new product development cycles you use? How are you seeing the market cadence right now from a cloud integration perspective? Is it 6 months, or shorter than that for each new release?
The cloud is driving faster release & upgrade cycles overall. Customers use cloud applications in their everyday lives and those consumer applications typically have rapid response to feedback; it’s not unusual to get an update on your iPhone apps once a month. We’re seeing those same expectations in the business applications space – you shouldn’t be waiting 6-12 months or more for updates to the product. The nature of cloud allows us to be much more responsive giving us the flexibility to push out updates when we need to.
Our release cadence is 8 weeks. We might go longer to a 16- or 24-week cycle for a major release. Our connectivity release cycle is much faster. Each quarter we’re typically releasing 2-3 new connectors and 2-3 upgrades to existing connectors. This release cadence has been a real advantage for us in closing deals and building customer loyalty. Every two months we’re putting in enhancements and new features – many of those driven from direct customer feedback. We’ve won more than a few competitive and strategic wins because we were able to incorporate feedback from the prospect during the proof of concept or trial phase of those deals within a short period of time.
Earlier we spoke about how your company is successfully using personas to guide new product development. Can you comment on how personas guide the development and launch of new products?
Personas provide that guiding star for the development team to build towards. It’s not just the “what” and the “how”, it’s the “who” and the “why”. When we start with personas we’re talking about the business problem or goal that our customer is grappling with. That’s where the innovation we talked about earlier comes in – we try to solve for the real world business problem and an authentic user experience for our target customer. After we have the persona solidified, then we apply a particular technology approach and design. Starting with what success looks like to the customer keeps things very clear and real in terms of design, scope, what the product will and will not do.
The development team has a much clearer understanding who they are building product for and why it needs to be a certain way. If there is a question or difference of opinion about the user experience or the way a certain feature should work, we always go back to the persona. It’s a very efficient sanity check throughout the development process – would our persona really use this feature in this way, would they be comfortable working that way in real life, do they really need this feature or capability to do these extra 5 things we think they do?
Personas are very helpful in discouraging developing products that might be perceived as cutting edge to the tech community but ultimately don’t give the customer what they need and want. We like cool technologies and features, and we’ll put it in there but only if it fits the persona.
Has any customer measured the impact of Scribe integration solutions in the context of improved user experience and customer satisfaction? If so, can you share those figures?
An interesting question and one we asked in our recent State of Data Integration 2013 survey. What we found was that over 70% of our survey respondents had no formal process for evaluating the success of their integration and articulating the return on investment either in operational improvements or customer satisfaction. With a partner involved there is some improvement as the partner has to typically prove the success of their engagement but it’s not what we’d like it to be. It’s virtually impossible to get a customer to capture any meaningful metrics after the project has been completed.
What we’re finding is that partners and customers don’t know where to begin to measure the impact of their integration and there are no standard templates or resources to use as part of the project planning & tracking. This is a problem we’re tackling in the coming months, providing standard metrics that any partner or customer can use to track the success of their integrations.
What are the most important metrics to keep in mind when evaluating the performance of a cloud integration platform? How did these metrics influence the design, coding and launch of Scribe Online?
The most important metrics are usability and performance. The obvious one, performance comes in many flavors but the big ones we look at are the responsiveness of the platform user interface, the throughput and speed of the integrations, and the reliability/availability of the platform overall. These are table stakes. When we say usability, we mean how many customers are actually creating and running integration jobs? How often are they logged into the system and what are they doing? Are they adding new integration jobs? Using new connectors? How many customers are renewing and/or increasing their subscription levels? These are metrics we measure. If a customer were evaluating a platform, questions I’d be asking would be “how long does it take to get a typical integration project live and running?”, “do you require professional services and how much/how long does that engagement typically run?”, and when talking to references “did you get your integration project done in the time frame you expected?”
Usability is very, very important to us. You can have a platform that processes billions of rows a day but if it is difficult to configure, use, and maintain, customers are going to gravitate to vendors that have both performance and better usability.
Have you seen a shift in the types of CRM applications being integrated within the last twelve months, and do you see trending of these systems changing in the next three years? Why or why not?
In the past twelve months, we’ve seen a shift where customers appear to be doing less of the rip and replace with new CRM systems and more where they are adding on other, customer-facing applications with discrete functions like marketing automation, e-commerce, sales productivity, or support. We’re also seeing an uptick in two-tier CRM integrations where a division or line of business will use one vendor’s CRM for specific range of capabilities but want to integrate with the legacy or corporate CRM.
Certainly the CRM vendors are adding more capabilities and providing more complete platforms that include marketing automation, support, e-commerce, finance, and social. What will be very interesting in the next three years is if businesses will embrace these platforms completely or if they will use parts and pieces of these platforms and integrate them with existing application investments or other CRM platforms. For instance, would a business decide to purchase Salesforce Support Cloud and integrate that with NetSuite? We think given what we’re seeing in with legacy applications – that businesses have made major investments in and are still realizing value from these applications – that a rip and replace to a complete CRM platform from one major vendor might be a bit of stretch. Given that cloud integration is evolving quickly, it would seem that a business could put together best of breed cloud CRM apps just as they did with premise applications in the past.
Often integration in small and medium businesses, which is a market Scribe excels in, are complacent about the need to change and adopt a more unified CRM system. Is complacency is your biggest competitor? How do you overcome that in your channel development, marketing and selling strategies?
We’re seeing SMBs are as savvy as our largest enterprise customers about integration. They get the need for an integrated CRM system to keep competitive. SMBs are requiring integration in the first phases of their CRM implementation and are asking partners about it. That’s a big shift from 4-5 years ago where partners had to educate the customer about the benefits of integration and why spending money/time/resources on integration are valuable. It’s less complacency that is our biggest obstacle with SMBs – its education and outreach that there are affordable, easy-to-use integration options out there for the SMB that allow them to realize the same business benefits as the big companies. If you define complacency as the common belief that there is just nothing out there right now for the SMB, then yes, it’s a competitor. We have been aggressive in recruiting partners who specialize in SMB and making sure our cloud integration platform have the features and capabilities so these partners can service a large volume of smaller customers quickly and cost-effectively. We also work with our partners with other marketing outreach to educate the SMB that integration is possible and how to best approach that first integration project. And it goes back to that usability metric – we want the SMB to have an easy time with integration – so that means proving it with our selling, our marketing, and our partner channel. All of it needs to be approachable and reinforce that integration is accessible and can be realized by the SMB.
What are Scribe’s top three goals for 2013, and how are you tracking to them?
Our top three goals in 2013 are to continue build out the features and services in our cloud platform, continue to offer more customer data connectivity, and continue to build out our ecosystem of ISVs and partners using our online platform. We’ve had excellent success in all three areas – we’ve announced partnerships and connectivity to Marketo, Silverpop, and ExactTarget and we continue to build and enhance the platform. The interest in the channel and the ISV community is very strong – we have as much incoming as we do active outreach – and we expect more ISV partnership announcements later this year.
When you and your company look three years into the future, what will cloud integration look like?
In three years, integration should be ubiquitous in most business applications. It’s not just about APIs – it’s about customers being able to connect quickly, easily, and seamlessly to other applications without having to stitch code together or understand what entities and methods to use. When we use consumer applications today, we don’t care or think about things like how to send a Tweet to my Facebook feed – we just press a button and it happens. I think you’ll see more turnkey integrations based on common business processes that business users can provision and manage within the user interface of their business application instead of using a separate application. There will always be a market for more sophisticated, unique integration needs but common business practices such as sales order processing should be something a business analyst or system administrator could invoke within a CRM or ERP user interface, perform some light customizations as needed, and provision.
Retailers and marketers often face the challenge of getting coupons, offers and promotions delivered at the perfect time and in the right context to their customers.
The rapid advances in cyber foraging, contextual computing and cloud computing platforms are succeeding at revolutionizing this aspect of the retail shopping experience. Context-aware advertising platforms and strategies can also provide precise audience and segment-based messaging directly to customers while they are in the store or retail outlet.
What makes context-aware advertising so unique and well adapted to the cloud is the real-time data integration and contextual intelligence they use for tailoring and transmitting offers to customers. When a customer opts in to retailer’s contextually-based advertising system, they are periodically sent alerts, coupons, and offers on products of interest once they are in or near the store. Real-time offer engines chose which alerts, coupons or offers to send, when, and in which context. Cloud-based analytics and predictive modeling applications will be used for further fine-tuning of alerts, coupons and offers as well. The ROI of each campaign, even to a very specific audience, will be measurable. Companies investing in cloud-based contextual advertising systems include Apple, Google, Greystripe, Jumptap, Microsoft, Millennial Media, Velti and Yahoo.
Exploring the Framework of Me Marketing and Context-Aware Offers
A few years ago, a student in one of my MBA courses in international marketing did their dissertation on cyber foraging and contextual mobile applications’ potential use for streamlining business travel throughout Europe. As a network engineer for Cisco at the time, he viewed the world very systemically; instead of getting frustrated with long waits he would dissect the problem and look at the challenges from a system-centric view. The result was a great dissertation on cyber foraging and the potential use of Near Field Communications (NFC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as sensors to define contextual location and make business travel easier. One of the greatest benefits of teaching, even part-time, is the opportunity to learn so much from students.
I’ve been following this area since, and when Gartner published Me Marketing: Get Ready for the Promise of Real-Time, Context-Aware Offers in Consumer Goods this month I immediately read it. Gartner is defining Me Marketing as real-time, context-aware offers in grocery stores. Given the abundance of data on transactions that occur in grocery stores, Gartner is predicting this will be the most popular and fastest-growing area of context-aware offers. The formula for Me Marketing is shown below:
The four steps of the Me Marketing formula are briefly described as follows:
Consumer Insight and Permission – The first step of the framework and the most difficult from a change management standpoint, this requires customers to opt in to receiving alerts, coupons, offers and promotions. The best retailers also have invested heavily in security and authentication technologies here too.
Delivery Mechanism and In-the-Moment Context – The real-time offer engine is used to determining which coupons, offers and promotions are best suited for a specific customer based on their shopping patterns, preferences and locations.
Select Best Offer – Next, the real-time offer engine next defines a very specific product or service offer based on location, previous purchase history, social media analysis, predictive and behavioral analysis, and previous learned patterns of purchasing.
Redemption – The purchase of the item offered. Initial pilots have shown that less frequent yet highly relevant, targeted offers have a higher redemption rate. It is encouraging to see that early tests of these systems show that spamming customers leads to immediate opt-outs and in some cases shopping competitors.
A Short Overview of Contextual Advertising and the Cloud
Cloud-based systems and applications are necessary for retailers to gain the full value that contextual advertising can provide. This includes the social context, with specific focus on aggregation and analysis of Social CRM, CRM, and social media content, in addition to behavioral analytics and sentiment analysis. It also includes the previous browsing, purchasing, returns and prices paid by product for each customer. Cloud-based integration architectures are necessary for making contextual advertising a reality in several hundred or even thousands of retail stores at the same time.
Geographical data and analysis is also essential. RFID has often been included in cyber foraging and contextual advertising pilots, in addition to NFC. As Global Positioning System (GPS) chip sets have dropped in price and become more accurate, companies including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are basing their contextual advertising platforms on them. Finally the activity or task also needs to have a contextual definition.
Combining all three of these elements gives the context of the customer in the retail store. The figure below is from Three-Dimensional Context-Aware Tailoring of Information. This study also took into account how personas are used by companies building cloud-based contextual advertising systems. The taxonomies shown in the figure are used for building personas of customers.
There are many pilot projects and enterprise-wide system tests going on right now in the area of cloud-based contextual advertising. One of the more interesting is an application suite created entirely on Google App Engine, Android, and Cloud Services. The pilot is explained in the study Exploring Solutions for Mobile Companionship: A Design Research Approach to Context-Aware Management. The following figure shows a diagram of the suite. This pilot uses Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) which is part of the Android API to link the Google App Engine server and Android client. Google will most likely add more depth of support for C2DM as it plays a critical role in contextual system development.
Benefits of a Cloud-based Contextual Advertising Platform
For the customer, cloud-based advertising systems over time will learn their preferences and eventually impact the demand planning and forecasting systems of retailers. This translates into the customer-centric benefits of products being out of stock less. In addition, customers will receive more relevant offers. The entire shopping experience will be more pleasant with expectations being met more often.
For the retailer, better management of product categories and more effective gross margin growth will be possible. Having real-time analytics of each coupon, offer and promotion will also give them immediate insights into which of their selling strategies are working or not.
For the manufacturer, the opportunity to finally understand how customers respond at the store level to promotions, programs including the results of co-op funds investment and pricing strategies will be known. The manufacturers who partner with retailers using these systems will also have the chance at attaining greater product differentiation as their coupons, offers and promotions will only go to the most relevant customers.
Tor-Morten Grønli, Ghinea, G., & Bygstad, B. (2013). Exploring Solutions for Mobile Companionship: A Design Research Approach to Context-Aware Management.International Journal of Information Management, 33(1), 227. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401212001259
2013 will be one of the most pivotal years for cloud computing because trust in these technologies is on the line.
Expectations are high regarding these technologies’ ability to deliver business value while reducing operating costs. Enterprises’ experiences have at times met these high expectations, yet too often are getting mixed results. Managing cloud expectations at the C-level is quickly emerging as one of the most valuable skills in 2013. The best CIOs at this are business strategists who regularly review with their line-of-business counterparts what is and isn’t working. These CIOs who are excelling as strategists also are creating and continually evaluating their cloud computing plans for 2013. They are focusing on plans that capitalize the best of what cloud computing has to offer, while minimizing risks.
CIOs excelling as strategists are also using cloud computing planning to punch through the hype and make cloud technologies real from a customer, supplier and internal efficiency standpoint. Lessons learned from these cloud computing planning efforts in enterprises are provided below:
Cloud computing needs to mature more to take on all enterprise applications, so plan for a hybrid IT architecture that provides both agility and security. This is a common concern among CIOs in the manufacturing and financial services industries especially. As much as the speed of deployment, customization and subscription-based models attract enterprises to the cloud, the difficult problems of security, legacy system integration, and licensing slow its adoption. There is not enough trust in the cloud yet to move the entire IT infrastructure there in the majority of manufacturing companies I’ve spoken with.
Reorganizing IT to deliver greater business agility and support of key business initiatives will be a high priority in 2013. The gauntlet has been thrown at the feet of many CIOs this year: become more strategic and help the business grow now. Cloud is part of this, yet not its primary catalyst, the need to increase sales is. IT organizations will increasingly reflect a more service-driven, not technology-based approach to delivering information and intelligence to the enterprise as a result.
Recruiting, training and retaining cloud architects, developers, engineers, support and service professionals will be a challenge even for the largest enterprises. There isn’t enough talent to go around for all the projects going on and planned right now. State Farm Insurance has 1,000 software engineers working on their mobility applications for claims processing and quoting for example. And they are hiring more. Certifications in cloud technologies are going to be worth at least a 30 to 50% increase in salary in specific positions. This is very good news for engineers who want to differentiate themselves and get ahead in their careers, both financially and from a management standpoint.
Measuring the contributions of operating expense (OPEX) reductions is going to become commonplace in 2013. From the cloud computing plans I’ve seen, OPEX is being tracked with greater accuracy than in any other year and will be a strong focus in the future. The capital expense (CAPEX) savings are clear, yet OPEX savings in many cases aren’t. Cloud computing’s greatest wins in the enterprise continue to be in non-mission critical areas of the business. This is changing as cloud-based ERP systems gain adoption within businesses who are constrained by monolithic ERP systems from decades ago. Plex Systems is a leader in this area and one to watch if you are interested in this area of enterprise software. SaaS is dominating in the area of lower application costs and high user counts, which is the Public Computing Sweet Spot in the following graphic:
Start building a SaaS application review framework including Service Level Agreement (SLA) benchmarks to drive greater transparency by vendors. Gartner forecasts that the SaaS-based cloud market will grow from $12.1B in 2013 to$21.3B in 2015, with the primary growth factors being ease of customization and speed of deployment. CIOs and their staffs have SaaS frameworks already in place, often with specific levels of performance defined including security and multitenancy audits. SLAs are going to be a challenge however as many vendors are inflexible and will not negotiate them. At a minimum make sure cloud service providers and cloud management platforms (CMP) have certifications for ISO 27001 and Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) No. 16, as this shows the provider is making investments in availability, security and performance levels.
Create a Cloud Decision Framework to keep technology evaluations and investments aligned with business strategies. Business and application assessments and the vendor selection process need to take into account application requirements, role of external cloud resources, and how the RFI will be structured. These process areas will vary by type of company – yet concentrating in application requirements goes a long way to reducing confusion and forcing trade-offs in the middle of a review cycle. The following is an example of a Cloud Decision Framework:
Mitigating risk and liability through intensive due diligence needs to become any cloud-based companies’ core strength. Regardless of how the HP-Autonomy litigation is resolved it is a powerful cautionary tale of the need for due diligence. And let’s face it: there are way too many SaaS companies chasing too few dollars in the niche areas of enterprise software today. A shakeout is on the way, the market just can’t sustain so many vendors. To reduce risk and liability, ask to see the financial statements (especially if the vendor is private), get references and visit them, meet with engineering to determine how real the product roadmap is, and require an SLA. Anyone selling software on SaaS will also have revenue recognition issues too, be sure to thoroughly understand how they are accounting for sales.
Design in security management at the cloud platform level, including auditing and access control by role in the organization. One manufacturing company I’ve been working with has defined security at this level and has been able to quickly evaluate SaaS-based manufacturing, pricing and services systems by their security integration compatibility. This has saved thousands of dollars in security-based customizations to meet the manufactures’ corporate standards.
Bottom line: 2013 is the make-or-break year for cloud in the enterprise, and getting started on a plan will help your organization quickly cut through the hype and see which providers can deliver value.
The latest round of cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts reflect the growing influence of analytics, legacy systems integration, mobility and security on IT buyer’s decisions.
Bain & Company and Gartner have moved beyond aggregate forecasts, and are beginning to forecast by cloud and SaaS adoption stage. SAP is using the Bain adoption model in their vertical market presentations today.
Despite the predictions of the demise of enterprise software, forecasts and sales cycles I’ve been involved with indicate market growth. Mobility and cloud computing are the catalysts of rejuvenation in many enterprise application areas, and are accelerating sales cycles. Presented in this roundup are market sizes, forecasts and compound annual growth rates (CAGRS) for ten enterprise software segments.
Key take-aways from the latest cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts are provided below:
Public and private cloud computing will be strong catalysts of server growth through 2015. IDC reports that $5.2B in worldwide server revenue was generated in 2011 or 885,000 units sold. IDC is forecasting a $9.4B global market by 2015, resulting in 1.8 million servers sold. Source: IDC Worldwide Enterprise Server Cloud Computing 2011–2015 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=228916
IDC reports that enterprise cloud application revenues reached $22.9B in 2011 and is projected reach $67.3B by 2016, attaining a CAGR of 24%. IDC also predicts that by 2106, $1 of every $5 will be spent on cloud-based software and infrastructure. Report, Worldwide SaaS and Cloud Software 2012–2016 Forecast and 2011 Vendor Shares, Link: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=236184
11% of companies are transformational, early adopters of cloud computing, attaining 44% adoption (as defined by % of MIPS) in 2010, growing to 49% in 2013. This same segment will reduce their reliance on traditional, on-premise software from 34% to 30% in the same period according to Bain & Company’s cloud computing survey results shown below. SAP is using this adopter-based model in their vertical market presentations, an example of which is shown here.
The global Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is growing from $900M in 2011 to $2.9B in 2016, achieving a 26.6% CAGR. At this projected rate, PaaS will generate an average of $360M a year in revenue between 2011 and 2016. Gartner projects that the largest segments will be Application Platform Services (aPaaS) which generated 35% of total PaaS spending in 2011, followed by cloud application lifecycle services (12.5). Source: Market Trends: Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 2012-2016, 2H12 Update Published: 5 October 2012 ID:G00239236.
The three most popular net-new SaaS solutions deployed are CRM (49%), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) (37%) and Digital Content Creation (35%). The three most-replaced on-premise applications are Supply Chain Management (SCM) (35%), Web Conferencing, teaming platforms and social software suites (34%) and Project & Portfolio Management (PPM (33%). The following graphic shows the full distribution of responses. Source: User Survey Analysis: Using Cloud Services for Mission-Critical ApplicationsPublished: 28 September 2012
In 2011, the worldwide enterprise application software market generated $115.1B in revenue, and is projected to grow to $157.6B by 2016, attaining a 6.5% CAGR in the forecast period. Gartner reports that 38% of worldwide enterprise software revenue is from maintenance and technical support; 17% from subscription payments; and 56% from ongoing revenue including new purchases. An analysis of the ten enterprise software markets and their relative size and growth are shown in the figure below along with a table showing relative rates of growth from 2011 to 2016. Source: Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 3Q12 Update Published: 12 September 2012 ID:G00234766
The Gartner forecast for Global IT spending by vertical market shows transportation, insurance, banking and securities, and communications, media and services (CM&S); and manufacturing providing g the greatest growth opportunities through 2016. The following graphic shows the industries graphed by Annual Growth Rate (AGR) and Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). Source: Forecast Analysis: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 2010-2016, 3Q12 Update Published: 7 November 2012
The economics of public cloud computing are accelerating the pace of change occurring in enterprise software today.
Many of the scenarios that Clayton Christensen insightfully describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma are playing out right now in many sectors of this industry, shifting the balance of purchasing power to line-of-business leaders away from IT. True to the cases shown in the book, new entrants are bringing disruptive innovations that are being successfully used to attack the most price-sensitive areas of the market. Winning customers at the low-end and making their way up-market, new entrants are changing the customer experience, economics and structure of the industry. Salesforce.com is a prime example of how the insights shared in The Innovator’s Dilemma are alive and well in the CRM market for example. This is an excellent book to add to your summer reading list.
Defining The Public Cloud
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have defined the public cloud in their latest definition of cloud computing in their September, 2011 brief you can download here (The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing). The NIST defines public cloud as “the cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.” In addition the NIST defines three models including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Gartner’s definition of public cloud computing is comparable yet includes Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) and Cloud Management and Security.
A quick check of the term public cloud on Google Insights shows the rapid ascent of interest in this area. A graphic from Google Insights is shown below:
Public Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise
In the many conversations I’ve had with CIOs and CEOs of manufacturing companies the role of cloud computing comes up often. There’s a very clear difference in the thinking of CIOs who see their jobs as selectively applying technologies to strategic needs versus those who are focused on compliance and risk aversion. The former see their enterprises moving to public and hybrid clouds quickly to better integrate with dealers, distributors and suppliers at a strategic level.
The public cloud’s pervasiveness in the enterprise is growing rapidly. This market dynamic is reflected in the report, Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2010-2016, 2Q12 Update (ID:G00234814). Gartner breaks out forecasts into the areas of Cloud Business Process Services/Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), Application Services/Software as a Service (SaaS), Application Infrastructure Services/Platform as a Service (PaaS), System Infrastructure Services/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Cloud Management and Security Services. Highlights from the report are presented in the following five areas:
Cloud Business Process Services/Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)
Gartner is predicting that BPaaS will grow from $84.1B in 2012 to $144.7B in 2016, generating a global compound annual growth rate of 15%.
Of the eight subsegments Gartner is tracking in their BPaaS forecast, Cloud Payments (17.8%) Cloud Advertising (17.1%) and Industry Operations (15.1%) are expected to have the greatest compound annual growth rates (CAGR) in revenues generated by 2016.
In terms of revenue generated, Cloud Advertising is projected to grow from $43.1B in 2011 to $95B in 2016, generating 17.1% CAGR in revenue growth through 2016.
Cloud Payments are forecast to grow from $4.7B in 2011 to $10.6B in 2016, generating a CAGR of 17.8% worldwide.
E-Commerce Enablement using BPaaS-based platforms is expected to grow from $4.7B in 2011 to $9B in 2016, generating a 13.6% CAGR in revenue globally.
Application Services/Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS-based applications are expected to grow from $11.8B in 2012 to $26.5B in 2016, generating a CAGR of 17.4% globally. Gartner tracks ten different categories of SaaS applications in this latest forecast with CRM, ERP, and Web Conferencing, Teaming Platforms, and Social Software Suites being the three largest in terms of global revenue growth.
The three fastest-growing SaaS areas include Office Suites (40.7%), Digital Content Creation (32.2%) and Business Intelligence applications (27.1%) having the highest CAGRs from 2011 through 2016.
SaaS-based CRM will see the largest global revenue growth of all categories, increasing from $3.9B in 2011 to $7.9B in 2016, achieving a 15.1% CAGR worldwide.
Web Conferencing, Teaming Platforms, and Social Software Suites will grow from $2B in 2011 to $3.4B in 2016, generating an 11.2% CAGR. Gartner is including Enterprise 2.0 applications in this category.
SaaS-based ERP is forecasted to grow from $1.9B in 2011 to $4.3B in 2016, achieving a 17.3% CAGR.
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is an area that Forrester, Gartner, IDC and others have predicted significant growth in. Gartner’s latest forecast for SaaS-based SCM is $1.2B spent in 2011 growing to $3.3B in 2016, representing a 21.1% CAGR.
Application Infrastructure Services/Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Gartner forecasts the worldwide enterprise market for PaaS platforms will grow from $900M spent in 2011 to $2.9B in 2016, representing a 26.6% CAGR.
Growth rates by PaaS subsegment include the following: Application Development (22%), Database Management Systems (48.5%), Business Intelligence Platform (38.9%) and Application Infrastructure and Middleware (26.5%).
Application Infrastructure and Middleware is expected to be the largest revenue source in PaaS for the next four years. Gartner reports this subsegment generated $649M in 2011, projected to grow to $2.1B in 2016, generating $1.5B in revenue and a 26.5% CAGR.
System Infrastructure Services/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
With a projected CAGR of 41.7%, this segment is the fastest growing of the five Gartner included in their public cloud forecast. From $4.2B in revenue generated in 2011 to $24.4B in 2016, IaaS is expected to grow by just over $20B in the forecast period globally.
CAGR by IaaS segment from 2001 to 2016 include Compute (43.2%), Storage (36.6%) and Print (16%).
The Compute subsegment is expected to see the greatest revenue growth globally, growing from $3.3B in 2011 to $20.2B in 2016, generating a 43.2% CAGR.
Cloud Management and Security Services
Comprised of Security, IT Operations Management and Storage Management, Cloud Management and Security Services generated $2.3B in 2011 with a forecast of $7.9B in 2016, generating a 27.2% CAGR.
IT Operations Management (38.2%), Storage Management (30.6%) and Security (23.7%) each have relatively high CAGRs through 2016.
Bottom line: Of the five areas Gartner includes in their forecast, BPaaS and its subsegments show trending towards greater support for enterprise-wide transaction and e-commerce management. With 76% of the entire 2012 public cloud forecast being in the BPaaS segment, it is clear Gartner is seeing strong interest on the part of enterprise clients to spend in this area.