Enterprise Cloud Computing

This supplement is an independent publication from Raconteur Media
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July 20, 2010
ENTERPRISE CLOUD COMPUTING
INNOVATION Cloud
computing could provide
your company with its
best opportunity yet to
outpace its competitors.
Are you ready, asks
Jessica Twentyman?
C
loud computing is happening
now - ignore it at your
peril. That’s the message to
business leaders from a host
of influential IT market analysts, who
claim that adoption rates are now so
strong that even the most cynical executives
are finding it increasingly difficult
to dismiss the cloud as pure hype.
“We are seeing an acceleration of
cloud computing and cloud services
among enterprises and an explosion of
supply-side activity as technology providers
manoeuvre to exploit the growing
commercial opportunity,” confirms Ben
Pring, research vice president at Gartner.
“The scale of application deploy-
ments is growing; multi-thousandseat
deals are increasingly common.
IT managers are thinking strategically
about cloud service deployments;
more progressive enterprises are
thinking through what their IT operations
will look like in a world of increasing
cloud service leverage.”
All this, he adds, was “highly unusual”
just one year ago. In 2010, Pring and his
colleagues forecast that worldwide cloud
services revenue will reach $68.3 billion,
a 16.6 per cent increase from 2009 levels.
And over the course of the next
five years, they expect organisations
worldwide to spend a staggering $112
billion on software as a service (SaaS),
platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure
as a service (IaaS), combined.
This represents a real step forward
from six months ago. In the previous
edition of this report, we pointed out
that business leaders knew that the old
way of running IT wasn’t working any
more, for three reasons: it was too slow,
incredibly wasteful and didn’t scale.
Then, the question on business
leaders’ lips was whether cloud
computing represented a good way
to conquer these problems. Six
months on, the consensus is that it
does - but also that the opportunity
is far wider than that.
In fact, we can safely say that
companies that choose NOT to take
the cloud seriously are now at real
risk of being left behind by more
nimble rivals.
THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES
It’s a simple matter of ability to innovate.
Cloud computing fundamentally
levels the playing field for companies
of all sizes. In the past, the costs
and time associated with launching
a new product or service could be
enough to discourage a company
from even trying them.
Now, for the first time, smaller or-
ganisations have access to the same
sophisticated, high-end computing
systems and applications that their
larger counterparts have long taken
for granted - because they don’t need
to own or manage these systems
themselves and they pay providers
only for the resources they consume.
Rapid deployment time and pay-
per-usage, too, are challenging the
mindset that innovative market responses
require long lead times and
substantial financial investment.
“Those that use these cloud services
smartly will be able to accelerate timeto-market
for new and improved
product and services, and outperform
their competitors in the process,” says
Stephen Coombs, UK practice director
for cloud and virtual data centre
consulting at EMC Consulting.
Cloud, he claims, is already help-
ing organisations to respond to market
opportunities one step (or more)
ahead of their rivals - and it is becoming
increasingly difficult for the naysayers
to ignore that fact.
It is also helping them to focus on
Innovate or
stagnate?
Take the next step at www.EMC.co.uk/privatecloud.
customer engagement. In a world
where making the next sale is down to
the level of engagement a company has
with its customer, cloud is offering inexpensive
and flexible ways to handle
the immense data storage and analytical
resources that customer-focussed
businesses require.
Finally, cloud computing is helping
businesses to better orchestrate their
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