Posts tagged ‘Windows Azure Platform’

Jun 17

How AWS And Azure Competing Is Improving Public Cloud Adoption

Public Cloud spending is predicted to grow at quickly, attaining 16% year-over-year growth in 2017.
Cowen’s AWS segment model is predicting Revenue and EBITDA to grow 25% and 26.8% annually from 2017 to 2022.
Microsoft Azure is viewed as the platform that customers would most likely purchase or renew going forward (28% of total vs. AWS at 22%, GCP at 15%, and IBM at 10%).

These and many other fascinating insights are from Cowen’s study published this week, Public Cloud V: AWS And Azure Still Leading The Pack (58 pp., PDF, client access reqd.). Cowen partnered with Altman Vilandrie & Company to complete the study. The study relies on a survey sample of 551 respondents distributed across small, medium and enterprises who are using Public Cloud platforms and services today. For purposes of the survey, small businesses have less than 500 employees, medium-sized businesses as 500 to 4,999 employees, and enterprises as more than 5,000 employees. The study provides insight on a range of topics including cloud spending trends, workload migration dynamics, and vendor positioning. Please see pages 5,6 & 7 for additional details regarding the methodology.

The more AWS and Azure compete to win customers, the greater the innovation and growth in public cloud adoption as the following key takeaways illustrate:

Existing Public Cloud customers predict spending will grow 16% year-over-year in 2017. Existing mid-market Public Cloud customers predict spending will increase 18% this year. SMBs who have already adopted Public Cloud predict a 17% increase in spending in 2017, and enterprises, 13%. Public Cloud providers are the most successful upselling and cross-selling mid-market companies this year as many are relying on the cloud to scale their global operations to support growth.

AWS dominates awareness levels with SMBs who have existing Public Cloud deployments, with Microsoft Azure the most known and considered in enterprises. Consistent with many other surveys of Public Cloud adoption, IBM SoftLayer scored better in enterprises than any other segment including SMBs (71% vs. 58%). Google Cloud Platform has its strongest awareness levels in SMBs, attributable to the adoption of their many cloud-based applications in this market segment. They trail AWS, Azure, and SoftLayer in the enterprise, however. Across all existing companies who have adopted Public Cloud, the majority are most aware of AWS and Microsoft Azure. The second graphic provides an overview of awareness across the entire respondent base.

Microsoft is the most-used Public Cloud and the most likely to be purchased or renewed by 28% of all respondents. While AWS is the most reviewed Public Cloud across all respondents, Microsoft Azure is the most used. When asked which Public Cloud provider they are likely to purchase or renew, the majority of respondents said Microsoft Azure (28%), followed by AWS (22%), Google Cloud Platform (15%) and IBM SoftLayer (10%). The following graphic compares awareness, reviewed and use levels by Public Cloud platform.

Only 37% of current Azure users expect to add or replace their Public Cloud provider, compared to 53% of current AWS users and 50% of GCP users. The study found that approximately 40% of respondents expect to add or replace their cloud provider in the next two years, compared to 43% who predicted that last year. Companies who have adopted Microsoft Azure are least likely to replace/add other vendors, as only 37% of current Azure users expect to add or replace, compared to 53% of current AWS users and 50% of GCP users.

AWS and Azure dominate all seven facets of user experience included in the survey. AWS has the best User Interface, API Complexity, and Reporting & Billing. Microsoft Azure leads all Public Cloud providers globally in the areas of Management & Monitoring, Software & Data Integration, Technical Support and Training & Google Cloud Platform is 3^rd on all seven facts of user experience.

18% of workloads are supported by Public Cloud today with SMBs and mid-market companies slightly leading enterprises (16%). Overall, 38% of all workloads are supported with on-premise infrastructure and platforms, increasing to 43% for enterprises. The following graphic illustrates the percentage of workloads supported by each infrastructure type.

77% of existing Public Cloud adopters are either likely or very likely to add a SaaS workload in the next two years, led by mid-market companies (81%). SMBs (76%) and enterprises (73%) are also likely/very likely to add SaaS workloads in the next two years. The majority of these new SaaS workloads will be in the areas of Testing & Development, Web Hosting, and e-mail and communications.

Cowen’s AWS segment model is predicting Revenue and EBITDA to have a five-year Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25% and 26.8% from 2017 to 2022. AWS Net Income is predicted to increase from $2.7B in 2017 to $8.2B in 2022, attaining a projected 24.5% CAGR from 2017 to 2022. Revenue is predicted to soar from an estimated $16.8B in 2017 to $51.5B in 2022, driving a 25% CAGR in the forecast period.

Sep 18

Seven Ways Microsoft Redefined Azure For The Enterprise And Emerged A Leader

As of Q2, 2016 Microsoft Azure has achieved 100% year-over-year revenue growth and now has the 2nd largest market share of the Cloud Infrastructure Services market according to Synergy Research.
Microsoft’s FY16 Q4 earnings show that Azure attained 102% revenue growth in the latest fiscal year and computing usage more than doubling year-over-year.
451 Research predicts critical enterprise workload categories including data, analytics, and business applications will more than double from 7% to 16% for data workloads and 4% to 9% for business applications.
Cloud-first workload deployments in enterprises are becoming more common with 38% of respondents to a recent 451Research survey stating their enterprises are prioritizing cloud over on-premise.

451 Research’s latest study of cloud computing adoption in the enterprise, The Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation – Workloads and Key Projects provides insights into how enterprises are changing their adoption of public, private and hybrid cloud for specific workloads and applications. The research was conducted in May and June 2016 with more than 1,200 IT professionals worldwide. The study illustrates how quickly enterprises are adopting cloud-first deployment strategies to accelerate time-to-market of new apps while reducing IT costs and launch new business models that are by nature cloud-intensive. Add to this the need all enterprises have to forecast and track cloud usage, costs and virtual machine (VM) usage and value, and it becomes clear why Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are now leaders in the enterprise. The following graphic from Synergy Research Group’s latest study of the Cloud Infrastructure Services provides a comparison of AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, and others.

Seven Ways Microsoft Is Redefining Azure For The Enterprise

Being able to innovate faster by building, deploying and managing applications globally on a single cloud platform is what many enterprises are after today. And with over 100 potential apps on their cloud roadmaps, development teams are evaluating cloud platforms based on their potential contributions to new app development and business models first.

AWS and Microsoft Azure haven proven their ability to support new app development and deployment and are the two most-evaluated cloud platforms with dev teams I’ve talked with today. Of the two, Microsoft Azure is gaining momentum in the enterprise.

Here are the seven ways Microsoft is making this happen:

Re-orienting Microsoft Azure Cloud Services strategies so enterprise accounts can be collaborators in new app creation. Only Microsoft is coming at selling Cloud Services in the enterprise from the standpoint of how they can help do what senior management teams at their customers want most, which is make their app roadmap a reality. AWS is excellent at ISV and developer support, setting a standard in this area.

Giving enterprises the option of using existing relational SQL databases, noSQL data stores, and analytics services when building new cloud apps. All four dominant cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM) support architectures, frameworks, tools and programming languages that enable varying levels of compatibility with databases, data stores, and analytics. Enterprises that have a significant amount of their legacy app inventory in .NET are choosing Azure for cloud app development. Microsoft’s support for Node.js, PHP, Python and other development languages is at parity with other cloud platforms. Why Microsoft Azure is winning in this area is the designed-in support for legacy Microsoft architectures that enterprises standardized their IT infrastructure on years before. Microsoft is selling a migration strategy here and is providing the APIs, web services, and programming tools to enable enterprises to deliver cloud app roadmaps faster as a result. Like AWS, Microsoft also has created a global development community that is developing and launching apps specifically aimed at enterprise cloud migration. Due to all of these factors, both AWS and Microsoft are often considered more open cloud platforms by enterprises than others. In contrast, Salesforce platforms are becoming viewed as proprietary, charging premium prices at renewal time. An example of this strategy is the extra 20% Salesforce charges for Lightning experience at renewal time according to Gartner in their recent report, Salesforce Lightning Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Unilaterally Replaced Older Editions; Negotiate Now to Avoid Price Increases and Shelfware Published 31 May 2016, written by analysts Jo Liversidge, Adnan Zijadic.

Simplifying cloud usage monitoring, consolidated views of cloud fees and costs including cost predictions and working with enterprises to create greater cloud standardization and automation. AWS’ extensive partner community has solutions that address each of these areas, and AWS’ roadmap reflects this is a core focus of current and future development. The AWS platform has standardization and automation as design objectives for the platform. Enterprises evaluating Azure are running pilots to test the Azure Usage API, which allows subscribing services to pull usage data. This API supports reporting to the hourly level, resource metadata information, and supports Showback and Chargeback models. Azure deployments in production and pilots I’ve seen are using the API to build web services and dashboards to measure and predict usage and costs.

Openly addressing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concerns and providing APIs and Web services to avoid vendor lock-in. The question of data independence and TCO dominates sustainability and expansion of all cloud decisions. From the CIOs, CFOs and design teams I’ve spoken with, Microsoft and Amazon are providing enterprises assistance in defining long-term cost models and are willing to pass along the savings from economies of scale achieved on their platforms. Microsoft Azure is also accelerating in the enterprise due to the pervasive adoption of the many cloud-based subscriptions of Office365, which enables enterprises to begin moving their workloads to the cloud.

Having customer, channel, and services all on a single, unified global platform to gain greater insights into customers and deliver new apps faster. Without exception, every enterprise I’ve spoken with regarding their cloud platform strategy has multichannel and omnichannel apps on their roadmap. Streamlining and simplifying the customer experience and providing them with real-time responsiveness drive the use cases of the new apps under development today. Salesforce has been successful using their platform to replace legacy CRM systems and build the largest community of CRM and sell-side partners globally today.

Enabling enterprise cloud platforms and apps to globally scale. Nearly every enterprise looking at cloud initiatives today needs a global strategy and scale. From a leading telecom provider based in Russia looking to scale throughout Asia to financial services firms in London looking to address Brexit issues, each of these firms’ cloud apps roadmaps is based on global scalability and regional requirements. Microsoft has 108 data centers globally, and AWS operates 35 Availability Zones within 13 geographic Regions around the world, with 9 more Availability Zones and 4 more Regions coming online throughout the next year. To expand globally, Salesforce chose AWS as their preferred cloud infrastructure provider. Salesforce is not putting their IOT and earlier Heroku apps on Amazon. Salesforces’ decision to standardize on AWS for global expansion and Microsoft’s globally distributed data centers show that these two platforms have achieved global scale.

Enterprises are demanding more control over their security infrastructure, network, data protection, identity and access control strategies, and are looking for cloud platforms that provide that flexibility. Designing, deploying and maintaining enterprise cloud security models is one of the most challenging aspects of standardizing on a cloud platform. AWS, Azure, Google and IBM all are prioritizing research and development (R&D) spending in this area. Of the enterprises I’ve spoken with, there is an urgent need for being able to securely connect virtual machines (VMs) within a cloud instance to on-premise data centers. AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM can all protect VMs and their network traffic from on-premise to cloud locations. AWS and Azure are competitive to the other two cloud platforms in this area and have enterprises running millions of VMs concurrently in this configuration and often use that as a proof point to new customers evaluating their platforms.

Bottom line: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the first cloud platforms proving they can scale globally to support enterprises’ vision of world-class cloud app portfolio development.

Sources:

451 Research: The Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation – Workloads and Key Projects

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide 2016 Reprint

Microsoft Earnings Release FY16 Q4 – Azure revenue grows 102% year-over-year

Synergy Research Group’s latest study of the Cloud Infrastructure Services

Mar 19

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Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Strategy and Roadmap Evident at Convergence 2013

Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote this morning at Microsoft’s Convergence 2013 marks a subtle, yet very significant shift in how this technology leader is marketing itself to partners and the outside world. They are humanizing their marketing, messaging and products.

Gone is the Spock-like precision of presentations packed with roadmaps, mind-numbing metrics and intricate feature analysis. The Nick Brophy Band made the keynote complete by delivering excellent sets.

Microsoft is learning that telling a good story trumps terabytes of metrics. They delivered a strong keynote today starting out showing how attendees reached out to the local community and helped Habitat for Humanity. Kirill then based the majority of his keynote on four customer success stories taken from the Microsoft Customer Excellence Award winners. Chobani, Shock Doctor, Revlon and Weight Watchers shared how they were able to better connect with customers and run more efficient businesses using Microsoft Dynamics.

The only aspect of these award winner’s stories that fell short was how the complexity of back office system integration was glossed over. No mention of third party or legacy system integration was made, which could have shown how far Microsoft and its partners have progressed on this point, especially with the help of integration partners like Scribe Software.

Microsoft’s Cloud-First Strategy Playing Well With Partners

For Microsoft to succeed with Windows Dynamics and Azure, they are going to need each partner and reseller to believe in the vision of a cloud-first strategy, then translate their unique expertise into sales. That’s going to be a challenge that Microsoft will have to deal with daily as it looks to further strengthen its partner and reseller base. The recent Azure outage caused by an expired SSL certificate is on the minds of many partners and resellers here too. Microsoft is promoting their Windows Azure Service Dashboard heavily here as a result.

Despite that recent outage, Microsoft’s ecosystem on Dynamics is flourishing , as is evidenced by the attendance and participation in this show. The cloud-first strategy has infused a sense of hope and anticipation in many partners and resellers. Walking the floor yesterday and today, nearly eight of every ten partners offered up how they are planning on the cloud without being asked about it.

Microsoft 2013 Roadmap Embracing the Cloud, Devices and Services

Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote underscored how committed Microsoft is to becoming as cloud, devices and services company. He cited the statistic that there are more devices connected to the Internet today than there are human beings on the planet.

Through several examples he also showed how Microsoft is moving full speed into being a devices and services business. Microsoft Windows Azure is the foundational component to this strategy. While Kirill did not specifically say that, it is clear from an architectural standpoint Windows Azure will be the foundational element of their devices and services strategy. Microsoft is already competing with market leader Amazon Web Services, Google, Rackspace and many others. For more information on the competitive landscape of this market, please see my previous post, Demystifying Cloud Vendors.

From a roadmap perspective this will also force Microsoft to support many more mobile operating systems and environments than they ever have before. For their device and services strategy to succeed for example, they will have to support Google Android and Apple iOS device interfaces capable of integrating with SQL Server, at a minimum.

The following table showing recently announced updates to the 2013 Microsoft Product Roadmap first appeared on the Redmond Channel Partner website on march 18^th.

Source: Redmond Channel Partner Magazine

Microsoft reports that Office365 will go to an accelerated release cycle, further capitalizing on the nature of a cloud-based architecture. Resellers at this conference like the Office 365 Open licensing program because it allows them to direct-bill customers for use of the suite, in addition to paying for the bundle of their services. Windows Azure-hosted versions of Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP will arrive in mid-2013 according to the article as well.

For the cloud, device and services strategy to succeed Microsoft must also succeed in convincing enterprise accounts to migrate their applications to Windows Azure. This is one of the most critical areas for the future of their cloud strategy in the enterprise, so expect to see customer stories and ongoing messaging on this point.

Bottom line: Microsoft is transitioning to a more humanized approach to marketing while embracing a cloud, device and services strategy. It will be the partner ecosystem that transforms that vision into a profitable reality.

Jun 26

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The Marketing of Cloud Multitenancy: How Early Adopters Are Killing The Hype

It’s impressive how quickly the teams evaluating CRM cloud-based applications are learning how to deflate the hype surrounding multitenancy.

One gets the impression that hype-hunting has now become a sport in these teams. In engineering-centric companies it’s a badge of honor to find out just how multitenant a cloud-based application or platform is. Multitenancy isn’t the only area they are looking at, but given the massive amount of hype surrounding this issue on the part of vendors, it generates more attention because evaluation teams are skeptical.

Teams evaluating CRM applications aren’t satisfied with an easily customized and used graphical interface or series of workflows, they are getting more interested in the architecture itself . In some cases they’ve been burned by claims of an application being SaaS-based when in fact the architecture is a glorified series of Citrix-like sessions running in the background or worse. I have seen a healthy amount of skepticism in the evaluations going on right now and recently completed of SaaS applications and entire cloud platforms. Gartner’s inquiry calls from corporate accounts must be accelerating as their clients look for guidance on how to sort out the multitenancy hype.

CRM, Multitenancy and the Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing

Gartner’s search analytics show that cloud computing and related terms had 29,998 searches in the last twelve months with cloud computing alone generating 10,062 searches. SaaS and related terms had a search volume of 19,000. These terms are among the most popular across all Gartner search terms for the last twelve months. In comparison, CRM had over 42,000 searches in the same period.

It’s in this area of CRM applications where multitenancy has gone into hype overdrive. Looking for differentiators, some CRM vendors are claiming not just multitenancy – but their specific brand of it. This confuses their prospects, which immediately energizes evaluation teams to do a more thorough job than they have ever done before. By claiming their own type of multitenancy, CRM vendors are ironically not just slowing down their own sales cycles, they are making the entire industry slow down. No wonder Gartner places multitenancy along the Peak of Inflated Expectations in the latest Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing which is shown below.

Making Sense of Elasticity and Multitenancy

It’s paradoxical that enterprise software vendors, especially those selling SaaS-based CRM applications, are attempting to turn multitenancy into a differentiator. What is needed is a greater focus on usability, flexibility in aligning workflows to specific needs, and better enterprise integration technologies. Sell the value not the product features.

Given the confusion differentiating on multitenancy is creating and the calls Gartner is getting on this issue, they published Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy. It includes what Gartner believes a cloud services provider must implement in terms of a multitenant service in addition to what SaaS-based applications need to provide. Here are their checklists for each area:

Multitenancy Service Requirements for Cloud Services Providers

Isolation of tenant data
Isolation of the tenant workspace (memory)
Isolation of tenant execution characteristics (performance and availability)
Tenant-aware security, monitoring, management, reporting and self-service administration
Isolation of tenant customizations and extensions to business logic
Continuous, tenant-aware version control
Tenant-aware error tracking and recovery
Tracking and recording of resources use per tenant
The ability to allocate resources to tenants dynamically, as needed and based on policy Horizontal scalability to support real-time addition/removal of tenant resources, tenants or users without interruptions to the running environment

Multitenancy in Cloud Application Services (Software as a Service) Applications

Be available 24/7, because of the potential global user base
Adopt new versions without disrupting the continuous operations of tenants, and preserve user customizations
Scale up or down on demand
Allow individual rollback and restore for each tenant
Not allow a “noisy neighbor” tenant to affect the performance of other tenants, or increase their costs
Be accessible from various locations, devices and software architectures to meet potentially global demand
Offer tenant-aware self-service

Gartner also released their Reference Architecture for Multitenancy, which is shown below. One of the key assumptions of this model is that multitenancy is a mode of operation where multiple, independent and secured instances of applications run in a shared environment. The model includes the seven different models of multitenancy Gartner has seen in their research. These seven models, listed across the top of the model beginning with Shared Nothing and progressing to Custom Multitenancy are across the top of the model.

The majority of enterprises I’ve worked with are looking to the Shared Hardware approach in an attempt to create backward compatibility to their legacy applications via Virtual Machines. Another area of interest is the Shared Container approach which relies on a separate logical or physical instance of a DBMS, and often isolates its own business logic. This is ideal for distributed order management systems and SaaS-based ERP systems for example. Yet the legacy application support in this type of multitenancy can get expensive fast.

Shared Everything Multitenancy is ideal for quickly on-ramping and off-ramping applications, tenants and individual system users and is what nearly all enterprise vendors claim to do. In reality only a handful do this well. This approach to multitenancy is based on the Shared Container approach including support for shared DBMS sessions. Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, VMWare WaveMaker and Zoho Creator are all examples of companies who have successfully delivered Shared Everything multitenancy.

With so much to gain by positioning an application or solution suite in the 6^th and 7^th models, vendors are rushing to define their own versions of Shared Everything and Custom Multitenancy. The land grab is on in this area of the multitenancy market right now. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are all expected to endorse and eventually have many of their cloud-based applications in the Shared Everything model. Each of these companies and many others will have a multi-model based approach to selling multitenancy as well.

Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy

Source: Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy

Bottom line: Enterprise software vendors can accelerate evaluation cycles and sell more by differentiating on the user experience and value delivered instead of trying to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) by creating their own definition of multitenancy.

Jun 18

Roundup of Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Forecasts, June 2011

The gap is beginning to close between the value SaaS-based applications have the potential to deliver and what customers are achieving.

While SaaS-based software vendors are making major strides in integration, reliability, system performance and usability, it is the enterprise buyer’s skepticism and high standards forcing the market to move forward. The latest series of market forecasts and surveys reflect greater use of actual customer results and a quickening pace of progress.

Performance-Driven Cultures and SaaS Adoption

Measuring business outcomes using industry standard and company-specific metrics typifies companies getting the best results. A lack of clarity or confusion around strategy based goals leads to low adoption and eventual abandonment of SaaS initiates. Sales and sales operations VPs are winning the debates against home-grown or internal system development based on speed of deployment, usability and integrated analytics of SaaS applications. Based on the surveys and research completed this year, the best SaaS implementations are designed on a firm foundation of measurable results including quantifying risk.

Performance-driven cultures have a higher success rate with SaaS pilots, are more thorough in defining their own infrastructure (IaaS) and platforms (PaaS), and also know what success looks like from a metrics-driven standpoint. The graphic, Performance-Driven Culture: The Metrics Continuum, shown to the left, was originally published in Gartner’s Predicts 2011: Enterprise Architecture Shifting Focus to Business Value Outcomes Report, November, 11, 2010 Philip Allega, et.al supports this point. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

Hype is Prolonging the Peak of Inflated Expectations

The bottom line is all really matters is measurable, repeatable performance when enterprises evaluate their SaaS strategies. Many marketing, sales, sales operations and service VPs must defend their choice of SaaS over legacy system upgrades or internal system development. Resistance to change and complacency in IT is slowly killing many companies who must step up and keep pace with their customers to survive. People are betting their jobs on this technology. Many in marketing, sales and service want to know how to improve and measure business strategy performance. That’s one of the main inflexion points in SaaS marketing today.

The reality for enterprise users is that nothing gets purchased, no matter how wonderful the claims, unless there are strong metrics that link them back to business performance. That’s what is deflating hype in this market faster than any other factor. You can download the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2010 from the link (no opt-in). Please click on the graphic to download the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2010.

Here are short summaries of the latest cloud computing and SaaS forecasts published recently:

Gartner is forecasting enterprise-based spending for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications will grow at a 16.3% compound annual growth rate through 2015. SaaS will grow at nearly double the pace of licensed enterprise applications during the forecast period. Licensed applications will grow at a n 8.5% CAGR during the same period. The following table, Total Software Revenue Forecast for SaaS Delivery Within the Enterprise Application Software Markets, 2007-2015 (Millions of U.S. Dollars) compares enterprise software spending by application category for the forecast period. Source: http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=260&mode=2&PageID=3460702&id=1728009&ref=
Total Software Revenue Forecast for SaaS Delivery Within the Enterprise Application Software Markets, 2007-2015 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)
The Asia-Pacific (APAC) Software as a Service (SaaS) market is expected to grow from $390M in 2008 to $4.3B in 2015, at an estimated CAGR of 41.0% from 2008 to 2015. The appeal and reach of software as a service (SaaS) continue to grow rapidly among enterprises in Asia Pacific. Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) is the largest regional SaaS market in Asia Pacific. SAAS is gaining momentum in ANZ because of the markets resemblance to the North American market with better broadband penetration, availability of applications getting delivered in SaaS mode and overall greater adoption of IT in general. Source: http://professional.wsj.com/article/TPMTPW000020110214e72e002k2.html

Cloud middleware systems markets at $1.5B in 2010 are forecast to reach $4.3B, worldwide by 2017. Cloud computing middleware represents the base for development of all cloud computing infrastructure as it supports systems integration and systems self-provisioning. Market leaders are predicted to be Akamai, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Source: http://wintergreenresearch.com/

Infonetics Research forecasts the overall managed security services market, including CPE, SaaS, and cloud services, to reach just under $17B by 2015. SaaS and cloud-based security services are expected to make up close to half of the overall managed security services market opportunity by 2015 Worldwide SaaS revenue is forecast to grow dramatically over the next few years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% from 2010 to 2015. Source: WSJ Journal

Cloud service adoption is up 61% from 2010 and 45% of multinational corporations (MNCs) already use cloud sourcing for at least some elements of key IT services. Cable & Wireless and Ovum partnered to create this white paper, full of excellent insights and research data: http://www.cw.com/assets/content/pdfs/resource/ovum-cloud-wp.pdf

IT services spend within the Asia-Pacific region will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.6% during the next four years to hit US$205 billion by 2015. This findings are from a recent study completed by Ovum: http://www.cfoinnovation.com/content/asia-pacifics-it-services-market-forecast-hit-us205-billion-2015

IDC Predicts $1.6B Cloud Market in 2011. The $1.6B figure is IDC’s projection for network equipment revenues used to power both public and private cloud deployments in 2011. Source: http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3919636

60 percent of companies worldwide said cloud computing is a top IT priority for the next year, the sentiment is even higher in the C-suite with three in four (75 percent) C-level executives reporting cloud computing as top of mind. According to an Avanade Research and Insights’ Global Survey: Has Cloud Computing Matured? Third Annual Report, June 2011, there is also significant purchasing of cloud services without the IT department’s knowledge, with nearly 20% of all purchases never reviewed with the CIO. Source: Avanade Research Report

By 2014, cloud computing services will grow to a $45B industry a year (IDC) and SaaS to grow at 21% CAGR to touch $17.6B. Microsoft recently published the following presentation, Grow Your Business with Cloud – Are You Ready? You can download a copy of the presentation by clicking on the presentation to the right.

The global cloud computing market is expected to grow from $37.8B in 2010 to $121.1 B in 2015 at a CAGR of 26.2% from 2010 to 2015 according to Yankee Group. SaaS is the largest segment of the cloud computing services market, accounting as it did for 73% of the market’s revenues in 2010. The IaaS and PaaS markets are still at a nascent stage and currently hold a small share of the Cloud computing services market. However, these are expected to witness moderate growth due to their flexibility and cost effectiveness.Source: CSS Corp. Analysis.

Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software emerged in 2009 as a fast-growing market for SaaS, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 40% projected for the next five years according to Gartner. PPM software consumption environments are changing radically, with hosted and SaaS options — as a result, most traditional on-premises vendors are forced to provide SaaS alternatives to counter new entrants and SaaS-only PPM vendors. Source: Competitive Landscape: SaaS Project and Portfolio Management Software, Worldwide, 2011 published 6 April 2011.

The managed server backup market is mature, but still growing, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% from 2009 through 2014 according to Gartner. Source: Market Trends: Cloud-Based Server Backup Services, North America, 2011 22 February 2011.

Forrester Research’s most popular report right now is Sizing The Cloud, Understanding And Quantifying The Future Of Cloud Computing predicts that public-cloud SaaS application spending will increase from $21.21B in 2011 to $78.43B in 2015. They are also forecasting that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) spending will jump from $.82B in 2011 to $9.8B in 2011. Their Sizing The Cloud study is one of the most comprehensive so far this year. A previous post based on forecasts from this report is Sizing the Public Cloud Computing Market.

Jun 12

15 Comments

Gartner Search Analytics Shows Spike in Platform as a Service (PaaS) Inquiries in 2011

Trends of search terms from user accounts and topics of their inquiries form the catalyst of research agendas in many IT advisory firms. At Gartner these two factors and others like them are commonly regarded as leading indicators of future IT spending.

Gartner has been delivering short analyses of these subject areas to clients in the form of reports, with the latest being Search Analytics Trends: Platform as a Service published on June 9, 2011. This report covers user search activity from April, 2009 to March, 2011. For purposes of the report, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is defined as cloud application infrastructure services delivered as a service. Gartner makes the point that PaaS includes no traditional software license and is expensed on a metered or utility basis. Presented below is the time series of searches by month from the report.

A few key take-aways emerge from the report, and they are presented below:

Cloud Middleware Services including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are still unknown to many Gartner IT user clients. As a result this area is seen with skepticism by many of their clients. In studies of PaaS adoption from other analysts at Gartner and Forrester, it is evident that internal software development will make or break the credibility of PaaS initiatives for the long-term.

When Gartner IT users search for PaaS on the website and throughout online research, the four most common secondary terms are IaaS and SaaS (7.05%), Magic Quadrant (6.12%) and cloud (5.72%). Clearly Gartner IT user clients are looking to define their own technology stack in this area and looking for a framework of reference of where PaaS fits into their own IT plans and architectures. The competitive intensity across the analyst community will most likely go up as a result of the uncertainty many IT buyers have over PaaS.

The top three vendors that Gartner IT users search for are Microsoft (18%), Amazon (13%) and Tata (11%). Additional vendors include IBM (11%), Salesforce.com (11%), SAP (7%), Google and Oracle (4%).

Bottom line: The key to PaaS adoption in larger enterprises, many of which are IT user clients of Gartner, is how successfully Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clarify their value proposition and how their apps add value to the platform layer.

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