The Doppler Quarterly Fall 2017 | Page 37

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