What about Google in 2018? They have yet to figure
out the Enterprise market and provide the complete
sets of services that they need, in order to compete
with both Microsoft and AWS. As a result, they will
continue to lag behind next year. However, they also
have the most money and are a huge brain trust, so
don’t count them out for 2019.
What about IBM in 2018? They will likely join the
countless other public cloud providers who under-
stand that they can’t compete with the likes of AWS,
Microsoft, or Google. I predict they will leave the
public cloud market in 2018.
Focus on Cloud Management
While 100 application workloads on a public or hybrid
cloud are easy to manage, when you get past 500, you
approach a tipping point. What’s a tipping point? In
this case, it’s the point where the number of applica-
tions, data sets, and cloud services is well past the
number that you’re able to manage with a manual
system.
2018 will find a new focus on enterprises that need to
manage their public or hybrid clouds. This will come
in the form of third party tools, as well as native cloud
tools. However, the core theme will be the same: The
ability to abstract human users from the complexity
of the public or hybrid clouds, and the application
workloads that run on the public or hybrid cloud.
These tools will also have the ability to automate
management tasks, such as backup and recovery,
security, governance, performance, and the other
20-30 things you need to manage on the public or
hybrid cloud. Need meets solution.
The Great Migration Continues
Finally, in 2018 we will continue to see the migration
of on-premises applications and data sets to public
and hybrid clouds. While most enterprises have
between 10 to 20 percent of their current workloads
on public and hybrid clouds this year, in 2018 we’ll see
those numbers jump to 16-32 percent.
The motivation will change as well. While most enter-
prises moved to public and hybrid clouds to save
operational dollars, they understand now that the
value is really around the agility and speed-to-market
that public and hybrid clouds provide. When doing
the real math on the real value, agility outpaces ops
cost savings by 10 to 1. As I’ve often said: “Enterprises
come to the cloud for the operational cost savings,
but stay for the agility.”
Mark my words, the above predictions will happen
next year, and the cloud will get another year older.
Cloud inflection started in 2008, when cloud com-
puting went from an abstract idea to a hype-driven
phenomenon. The modern cloud market is really
about 10 years old.
Count on it taking another ten years for enterprises
to get to where they need to be with the cloud.
David Linthicum is a cloud computing visionary and pundit. He has written 13
books, published 3,000 articles and presented at over 500 conferences on
cloud computing. His views are his own.
FALL 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 35