Posts Tagged ‘IDC’

Hosted Private Cloud Services to Surpass $24 Billion in 2016

March 1st, 2013
Posted by: admin

 

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

Good news from IDC yesterday — at least for those of us engaged in private cloud hosting.

The research group forecasts that worldwide spending on hosted private cloud services will surpass $24 billion in 2016.  Compare that to $5.5 billion spent on such services last year. IDC predicts that spending will rise 64% to $9.1 billion in 2013.

Have a look below at the press release, which also talks about two popular private cloud deployment models:

IDC Forecasts Worldwide Spending on Hosted Private Cloud Services to Surpass $24 Billion in 2016

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., February 28, 2013 – According to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on hosted private cloud (HPC) services – an operational model for deploying computing infrastructure services of many types via a cloud model – will be more than $24 billion in 2016. HPC spending will experience a compound annual growth rate of more than 50% over the 2012-2016 forecast period as companies and IT providers look to cloud in its various forms as a means to transform and make more efficient and scalable the “how” of what they provide to their customers. Along the way, Hosted Private Cloud services will become the backbone of a new set of infrastructure services, transforming existing provider models for IT outsourcing, hosting infrastructure services, and other key IT industries.

At the highest level, there are two types of deployment models for cloud services: public and private. Public cloud services are designed for a market and are open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users who share the services. Private cloud services are designed for a single enterprise and have user-defined and controlled restrictions on access and level of resource dedication.

Hosted private cloud is a composite view of two private cloud services deployment models, both of which offer customers and providers very different choices about resource dedication, tenancy cost, user access/control of the computing asset, and real and perceived security structures in place. The two HPC deployment models are:

  • Dedicated Private Cloud: This model offers dedicated 1:1 physical compute and storage resources focused on the needs of one enterprise or extended enterprise. This model offers the greatest customer control over their contracted resource. Examples of dedicated private cloud service offerings include Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, Savvis Symphony Dedicated, and Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition.
  • Virtual Private Cloud: This model is an adjunct of public cloud services with shared virtualized resources and a range of customer control and security options distinct from most public cloud services. Examples of virtual private cloud service offerings include Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Plus, Savvis Symphony VPDC/Open, and Rackspace RackConnect.

“IDC anticipates that virtual private cloud will be the predominant operational model for companies wanting to take advantage of the speed and lower capital costs associated with cloud computing while cloud service providers will welcome the move away from the expense of dedicated 1:1 physical systems for delivering their business process and datacenter outsourcing and other services,” said Robert Mahowald, Research Vice President, SaaS and Cloud Services.

Virtual private cloud is expected to make steady gains in part because of its similarity to public cloud, particularly public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which many IT buyers are already using as a cost-saving alternative to replacing aging infrastructure. As more companies evaluate their Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) options, the need to centralize the management of all cloud-sourced capabilities will become apparent. Meanwhile, the majority of dedicated private cloud buyers will be those companies with existing IS outsourcing or hosted infrastructure services contracts. Potential buyers of dedicated private cloud services will place a premium on off-loading the asset management burden and on operational reliability, over and above other cloud features such as scalability, granular billing, and customer self-service.

When dedicated private cloud grows, the winners are likely to be large incumbent packaged software providers and equipment providers, global systems integrators, professional services firms, and telecommunications service providers. These providers are working mightily to build single-vendor stacks, providing all the underlying components from bare metal to “trusted partner applications.” But if virtual private cloud becomes the dominant provider-based model, as IDC expects, it will be more like a public cloud model with mostly standardized, virtually dedicated assets, which means a vastly different set of vendors will benefit.

“Not even the largest technology incumbents can sustain IT market leadership without achieving leadership in cloud services. Quite simply, vendor failure in cloud services will mean stagnation,” added Mahowald. “Vendors need to be doing everything they can – today – to develop a full range of competitive cloud offerings and operating models optimized around those offerings.”

The IDC study, Worldwide Hosted Private Cloud Services 2012-2016 Forecast: New Models for Delivering Infrastructure Services (Doc #238689), examines the hosted private cloud services market, composed of dedicated private cloud services and virtual private cloud services. The study includes a detailed discussion of the overall cloud services market and how public and private cloud services are distinguished from one another, as well as revenues for 2011 and a five-year growth forecast for 2012-2016.

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Is the Big Data Market Growing by Billions? You Bet!

January 28th, 2013
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By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

Big data, big data, big data.  It may sound like an overused buzzword of the day, but it’s an incredibly important phenomenon that will have a lasting impact well into the future as large enterprises – particularly health care, banking, retail and educational organizations – focus their operations around developing more sophisticated big data tools and technologies to collect, manage and analyze large information sets.

Goodbye, filing cabinets. Online storage is a convenient, collaborative and flexible solution to creating and managing a centralized, secure data store.

Big data is a fast growing market, and it has enormous potential to transform your organization (as it simultaneously transforms your customers, partners and competitors).  Just how big is the big data market?  Well, according to a recent report by Transparency Market Research, the global big data market was worth around $6.3 billion last year.  The projections are staggering, however.   Projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of about 41 percent, the big data market will be worth $48.3 billion by 2018.  The research firm said that North America will be responsible for roughly 55 percent of the market through 2018, followed by Europe.

What is driving this market growth?  Well, mostly, unstructured data.  Conventional database management tools just don’t cut it when it comes to unstructured data, so better tools are required.  “The exponential growth in the quantum of big data is leading to the development of advanced technology and tools that can manage and analyze this data,” confirms Transparency Market Research.

IDC industry research also supports the healthy growth of big data.   IDC projects that the global market for big data technology and services will expand at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 32 percent between 2012 and 2016.  Roughly speaking, that’s seven times faster than the information and communication technology market.  IDC indicates that by 2016, we can expect to see revenue from the big data sector near $24 billion.

Unquestionably, big data is not just the trend of the moment.  It’s here to stay.  Companies will continue to capture, analyze and store enormous volumes of data.  According to The McKinsey Quarterly, “In 15 of the U.S. economy’s 17 sectors, companies with more than 1,000 employees store, on average, over 235 terabytes of data—more data than is contained in the U.S. Library of Congress.”

It’s becoming increasingly clear that businesses that succeed in managing these enormous information sets, while grasping fully how to find value in them, will improve their ability to make strategic decisions and enhance their customer service.  That’s a likely recipe for more business expansion and revenue growth.

So, what does this mean for the hosting industry and AIS Network?

The big data technology and services industry represents a global opportunity for companies like ours, not to mention job seekers with the right industry domain expertise.  Increasingly, the spotlight will be on the hosting industry’s ability to host these new database technologies successfully and provide secure, reliable, easy-to-use online storage for massive amounts of data – much of it quite sensitive.

Because most of our clients have stringent security and compliance requirements tied to SOX, PCI, HIPAA and FISMA, they use our online storage for their big data needs.  Rather than choosing to store their data on physical, local storage devices, most have opted to store it to a secure, remote database in the cloud that may be accessed via the Internet.

Cloud storage is rapidly becoming the go-to solution for managing and analyzing big data.  It eliminates the need for unsecure physical storage devices and allows authorized employees, partners and vendors ready access to the data.  It’s a convenient, collaborative and flexible solution to creating and managing a centralized, secure data store.   Let us know if you’d like to learn more about online storage.

Are you interested in learning more about big data technologies and tools?  Check out this conference, Big Data DevCon, which is scheduled to take place in Boston this spring.

Happy data crunching!

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Cloud Computing Is Spurring Worldwide Job Creation

March 9th, 2012
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By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

The cloud will have an enormous impact on job creation.  It’s a disruptive technology that will transform the world as we know it.  It will drive down IT costs, foster innovation and create millions of new employment opportunities around the world.

Yep, that’s pretty much what we were thinking last month, when we doubled the size of the AIS Network cloud.   However, this week, new research from industry analyst firm IDC makes it official: 

Spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015. 

And,

IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues.

Researcher John Gantz, senior vice president at IDC, led the study and authored the white paper.  Both were commissioned by Microsoft.  Gantz is  a remarkably knowledgeable and interesting colleague for whom I have great respect.  Since I used to work alongside him on the Business Software Alliance’s worldwide piracy studies (from 2001-2006), I was eager to read his newest findings.  Among them, there was a note on small businesses.  Although small businesses make up the majority of employment in most parts of the world, they are generally less computerized. At the same time, IDC expects small- and medium-size businesses to adopt cloud services faster than large companies, many of which are constrained by existing legacy investments. “So when you put it all together, the two trends balance out, and you get a 50-50 split,” says Gantz.

The study also found that the number of new jobs produced by cloud computing will be somewhat proportional to the size of each industry, but not entirely. In some industries, such as professional services and retail, the high percentage of small- and medium-size businesses will drive up adoption. In other sectors, such as banking, security issues will slow the move to the public cloud, but may increase adoption of private IT cloud services.  Overall, three industries expected to generate the most cloud-related jobs are:

  1. communications and media (2.4 million),
  2. banking (1.4 million), and
  3. discrete manufacturing (1.3 million).

The highest percentage of new jobs will occur in emerging markets, according to the study, especially China and India, which together are expected to produce nearly 6.8 million cloud-enabled jobs between 2011 and 2015. This can partly be attributed to the size of their workforces, and partly to the fact that many Chinese and Indian companies aren’t bound by large legacy system investments. “We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets, but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud,” Gantz says. “They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back.”

Nearly 1.2 million new cloud-related jobs will be created in the U.S. and Canada, according to the IDC study. An early adopter of cloud computing, the U.S. accounted for 62 percent of worldwide spending in public IT cloud services in 2011.

IDC developed its results by analyzing cloud spending trends in more than 40 countries and then using this information to forecast the number of jobs this spending will create.

The Cloud Improves Quality of Life

With these unprecedented opportunities also comes an improved “quality of life” for IT managers.  The cloud is helping companies to be more innovative by freeing up IT managers to work on more mission-critical projects.  To that point, here’s a good snippet from the Microsoft press release:

“We deployed Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune for one of our clients, and the comment we heard from the chief operations officer is that he can actually schedule a meeting with the IT director to talk about strategic applications,” says Carol Reid, sales director for Agile IT, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member headquartered in San Diego, Calif. “Whereas before, the IT director was chasing fires and tending to pretty basic plumbing, he now has the bandwidth to pursue truly strategic projects that move the business forward.”

In addition, many businesses are using the cloud to improve how they work with customers and partners.

“One of the trends we’re seeing is that companies are using cloud-based collaboration software not just for their internal employees, but to engage and share information with partners and vendors,” says Aaron Nettles, co-founder and CEO of Vorsite, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member based in Seattle, Wash. “So it’s really not just about maintaining technology but also about leveraging it to drive revenue for the business.”

To accommodate the growing interest in the cloud, Nettles plans to double the size of his workforce this year. “It seems like a threshold has been crossed where customers are no longer asking, ‘Is the cloud right?’ but ‘When can we get it deployed?’”

Among the enterprises making use of the cloud to boost innovation is Underwriters Laboratories (UL), a global company that provides safety testing and certification for a wide range of product categories. In recent years, the company has acquired several businesses to broaden the services it offers to customers. Because Office 365 frees the company from adding and maintaining new servers, UL has been able to complete its technology integrations very rapidly. Whether it’s a large acquisition in China or a small one in Australia, UL can now integrate new employees within a few weeks instead of several months.

“I didn’t have to staff up with a bunch of contractors or take project managers off other projects,” says Christian Anschuetz, the company’s chief information officer. “And that allowed us to take resources that would otherwise have been needed for our internal integration and focus them instead on growing the business to the benefit of customers. I can’t tell you how much that’s worth.”

Will the cloud be an important force in helping to restore worldwide economic health?  Well, that remains to be seen.  However, from our experience (and apparently that of Microsoft), the cloud is top of mind for CIOs in the U.S. and Canada and, in fact, around the world.  They want to understand how they can use it to grow their companies, and they want to ensure they have the best people (and skills) in place to make it happen.  We at AISN stand ready to help guide them through that educational process.

What’s your view on the new IDC study?  Take a look at the chart below and leave your comments.

Cloud services

Public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide between 2012 and 2015, according to a new study by IDC.

 

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What Is Cloud Computing?

January 18th, 2011
Posted by: Laurie Head
Cloud computing icon
Image via Wikipedia

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President, Marketing Communications

Cloud computing is no longer just hype or a buzzword for the times.  It’s here to stay and it’s reshaping the IT marketplace as we know it.

The media is thirsty for stories about the cloud.  “The cloud” and “cloud computing” have become ubiquitous in business and technology news stories.  It’s popping up in consumer ads and quickly making its way into the high-level discussions of policymakers in Washington, DC.

Early cloud adopters in both the private and public sectors are yesterday’s news story.  They have paved the way for the rapidly expanding early majority. And to that end, IDC industry analysts expect that worldwide IT spending on cloud services will reach $42 billion next year — in large part because the cloud computing model “offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT.”  And these days, who isn’t cost cutting?

So, if cloud computing is such a big deal, why does the concept itself still leave many scratching their heads?  What is cloud computing, exactly?

Well, the term has been used many ways lately.  According to the Business Software Alliance, “The key features of the cloud are the ability to scale and provide, as needed, data storage and computing power dynamically in a cost efficient way, without the user having to manage the underlying complexity of the technology.  Cloud computing offers tremendous potential for efficiency, cost savings and innovations to government, businesses and individuals alike.  These benefits will improve government services and citizen access; transform businesses; provide new innovations to consumers; improve important services such as health care and government-provided services; and create energy savings.”

As the new decade unfolds, we can expect to see more businesses, consumers — and even lawmakers — rushing to educate themselves about cloud technology and the implications that it holds for the way they work, live and play.  And, they will be asking lots of questions.  How will it alter the landscape of traditional IT offerings?  How will it drive down costs?  How will it dovetail with traditional IT architecture?  Will it give rise to new policy debates?

BSA, the voice of the world’s software industry on a range of business and policy affairs (and for whom I once worked), has produced a solid educational video “to help speed this transition, especially for policy-makers.”  The video provides the fundamentals of cloud computing — including what defines it and how it is being used, touches on its many benefits (increased efficiencies, scalability, enhanced functionality, cost savings, etc.), and then outlines key policy considerations for lawmakers.

If you are already familiar with the news coverage around cloud computing trends, you might wonder if cloud computing has the potential to usurp existing server, desktop and mobile technologies altogether. BSA’s video explains why the cloud model will instead “complement more-established IT architecture.” The video describes public, private and hybrid cloud-based implementations and responds to a wide range of policy questions on privacy and security, technology standards, intellectual property and more.

Watch the video. I would be interested in your thoughts.

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