“ … the most important force in the IT market next year will be the continuing build-out and maturing of the cloud
services and consumption model,” IDC said. “The emergence of enterprise-grade cloud services will be a unifying theme in this area … — the most strategic real estate in the cloud for the next 20 years.”
Enterprise-grade cloud services will dominate the IT market for the next 20 years. Installed client-server software, BPO services and other legacy platforms represent the past 20 years of IT computing. Cloud services represent a disruptive technology and as such cannot be embraced by legacy vendors in an incremental fashion … you’re either on the bus or you’re under it. The losers are businesses that try to navigate these shifts with a toe in both technologies paying lip service (e.g., being buzzword compliant) to the new-technology but still delivering their solution with the legacy approach.
Enterprise-grade cloud platforms provide 99.9%+ availability, and utilize multi-tenant, web-service based architectures that can easily integrate cloud-to-cloud. They not only sit in the cloud, but they provide incremental business value enabled by their position in the cloud (e.g., salesforce.com’s Chatter and InfoNow’s Global Trading Partner Registry).
The challenge for buyers will be to weed out the posers and engage the vendors with a true commitment to the future of enterprise-grade cloud services.
