Cloud trends for 2012

There were a few recurring topics of conversation at the cloud expo in philadelphia @phorum 2012 last week - 

1. Enterprises have allocated budget in 2012 to venture into the cloud (public/private/hybrid)
2. Security is the #1 reason preventing companies from moving to the cloud
3. There is a paradigm shift in the role of internal IT for enterprises
4. Cloud options are not always cheap

With speakers such as James Staten from Forrester Research , Nick Carr of 'The Big Switch' fame and Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com, it was clear that the cloud phenomenon is the next logical step in evolution after the internet era.  

It was interesting to see companies of all sizes were using SaaS, circumventing IT in some cases. There were examples of developers, who needed to get their concepts to reality faster but did not want to wait for VM or hardware stack to arrive through the IT channels. These developers were using Amazon EC2 and other services to put their ideas to reality much quickly.  

Several enterprises acknowledged this growing trend of developers, sales and business people using cloud based services in addition to their corporate systems. With the popularity of services like Gmail, Evernote and the ubiquitous iphones and android devices,  companies are now embracing the idea of  speeding innovation and gaining competitive edge in the market, even if it means not having everything within their own premises. With a pay as you go model and no long term contracts, it was easier to try out SaaS solutions without having to go through the traditional scrutiny from IT, security and other departments.

Forrester did a survey and found that an average of 40 different SaaS services were used by employees at many enterprises. The number grew to 200 when matched with the services employees claimed in their expenses. This growing trend is indicative of two things -

• Departments such as development, research or sales are looking for a quicker and easier way to get their jobs done. It could mean signing up for a free amazon ec2 account to get their mobile idea to reality sooner or sales reps maintaining their contact information in salesforce.com so they can access it anywhere
• Researchers and other business functions that have a need for computing resources for a limited period of time can now use the elasticity and convenience that the cloud provides to utilize the resources when they want it, without bearing the traditional capex for on-premise systems
• Enterprises looking to innovate and stay ahead of the curve see opportunities to collaborate with the best of breed cloud services and augment their core functionality with other solution providers. 

Companies such as Neat Receipts, which started as an expense management application has now grown into a multi-million dollar cloud based information and document management companies.  Neat receipts started with managing expenses through their scanner and software interface have now evolved into managing all types of documents, from scanning paper based receipts to contracts and invoices.

What it means for enterprises -

• Companies of all sizes are looking to move to the cloud. Private cloud or hybrid cloud is an option for those who want to test the water by putting their internal systems in a more controlled environment
• Amazon EC2 is leading the pack with a plethora of offerings
• Compliance, Security, Cost and Reliability are issues that IT groups have to look into for the cloud services
• The role of IT has changed from managing internal systems to monitoring and advising on SaaS based solutions

What it means for solution providers -

• Capitalize on the opportunities in the SaaS, IaaS and monitoring space
• While big guys like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are focussed on building their infrastructure, the opportunity is for vendor to fill the white spaces.  Areas such as cloud monitoring, compliance and interoperability between different IaaS providers opens up many avenues for software and services vendors to captitalize on.

What is means for consumers -

• You are finally liberated from your legacy systems.  You do not need to use a specific user interface/system if it does not work for you. 
• The line between corporate and personal space is thinning with the emergence of cloud and mobile.
• Evaluate freemiums carefully, look for tell tale signs of spikes in prices after trial periods. Although there are many cloud provider who offer free stuff, anything that is really of value for an end user is not truly free. Evaluate your options and put a $ value to the time spend in evaluation.