Short and sweet.
- The cloud computing market will grow in 2009.
- Most of that growth will be enjoyed by a small number of large vendors (e.g., Amazon, Salesforce.com) with solid reputations for technical prowess, reliable service, and financial stability. (The financial stability part is not to be underestimated; it will win over CFOs and CIOs.)
- Despite all the buzz at conferences and the cheery encomiums exchanged in blogs, new entrants and small vendors—especially vendors who try to replicate or enhance in a minor way the offers of the major vendors—will have a tough time closing deals and generating cash.
- Small vendors who pursue niche markets and apply their domain expertise to bring the power and convenience of cloud computing to business areas underserved by IT, stand a chance of gaining market traction and growing a small, profitable business by delivering operational business value to customers.
The success of this last group will depend as much on their domain expertise (e.g., about problems with insurance claims processing) and consulting skills as on their particular cloud infrastructure.
Comments welcome.
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1 comment:
Interesting predictions. I've been learning a bit more about cloud computing lately as it seems to be the "new" thing. I even got a mailer yesterday from Mosso (www.mosso.com) which is Rackspace's cloud service.
The perceived (and I guess real) security/privacy issues surrounding cloud computing seems to be a big hurdle for vendors right now. Google managed to get around this with their "don't be evil" motto but I'm not sure they really touted themselves as "cloudy" in the beginning.
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