A Cloudy Future for Computing

By Michelle Savage

June 16, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 9)
Companies looking to embrace cloud computing are finding that getting a grasp on the technology is a lot like trying to grab hold of, well, a cloud.

The increasing costs of power, staff and equipment have prompted many small and medium-sized businesses to embrace cloud computing as a viable solution for managing computing environments. As cloud computing becomes a more accepted way of delivering enterprise system functionality, it seems the sky is the limit for companies entering this space.

But experts said the cloud will not be embraced overnight. According to Forrester Research analyst James Staten, there are a couple of things going on in today’s cloud computing market that make its future a bit cloudy.

First of all, he said, cloud computing is simply not a viable option for enterprises. “When we talked to enterprise IT departments, they’re not interested in this at all,” he said. “They view this as rinky-dink, high-risk and not ready for them. And they’re right. It’s not. That’s the other thing that makes this market really interesting. This market is not being built for enterprises—it is being built for a brand new buyer.”

Staten added that cloud computing is showing the classic signs of disruptive innovation, which he describes as “the use of technology that does not meet the needs of the current market, but directly meets the requirements of a tangential market, and then rides the growth of that tangential market to the point where it either topples the current market or topples all the players that are currently meeting the need of the current market.
 
“This has all the earmarks to be one of those,” said Staten. “If that proves to be true, which we won’t know for five to 10 years, there’ll be a significant shifting in the landscape of the IT vendor community.”

Cloud computing, once a concept as blurry as its name suggests, is becoming an increasingly familiar and widely used technology. But there is still some confusion as to what it is and how it is used. Staten defined cloud computing as a “pool of abstracted, highly scalable and managed compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption.”

Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Microsoft

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