220 Billion Reasons to Consider the Future of Cloud Computing

 We don’t often see opportunities as clearly as this. Cloud computing is literally reinventing what we know as the computer industry and there’s a $220 billion TAM to be addressed by 2020. I’ve written in the past about Open Source eating the software world. Well the corollary is that Cloud is growing the software industry as Everything becomes available as a cloud Service (EaaSe). In fact, according to industry analysts, this opportunity has nearly doubled in size in the last year and we’ve seen that in our own portfolio, which has more than doubled in value to over $2bn+ as of today. And it’s clear to us that it’s still early enough and there are enough drivers and inhibitors that present real opportunity to invest, so long as you read carefully between the clouds.

So as an entrepreneur, where might you invest? To find out, we are now in the third year of running what has now become the industry’s broadest independent survey with  vendors, like Amazon and Microsoft.

So what’s the net on this year’s findings? Three things stand out:

1 - Everyone is looking for competitive advantage from Agility & Scalability, but Business is driving Cloud, by adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) and productivity applications. They are outpacing IT, though IT is investing heavily in the rapidly blending areas of Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IPaaS) to catch up.

2 - Hybrid cloud is spelled out as the desired future state, but there are still significant challenges (and therefore opportunities) to realizing broad adoption.

3 - As Everything becomes available as a a cloud Service (EaaSe), future value will come from Cloud Formed companies that are simply ABC - Amazing Because of Cloud.

As this is a survey about the future of cloud computing, we also have taken time to talk to dozens of vendors, analysts, bankers and most importantly CIOs and users about how to form our take on opportunities arising in business and technology such as:

How companies will use open APIs to create new and disruptive business processes and businesses models, ushering in an era of “out-servicing” (outsourcing everything but their core competencies)

How EaaSe will cause the era of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to move to BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud Services) and we will enter an era of “boundary-less” computing

As part of the above, we will share why it rains Big Data at the following articles .