VMTurbo, the leading provider of software-defined control for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced its role as a collaborator in releasing the results of the third annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey, conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM Research and supported by 56 other collaborating organizations. This year's survey is the largest to date, examining viewpoints on drivers, inhibitors and opportunities in cloud computing across a sample of 855 respondents, including business users, IT decision makers and cloud vendors. More than a third of respondents were C-level executives within their organizations.

Cloud adoption continued to rise in 2013, with 75 percent of those surveyed reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform - up from 67 percent last year. That growth is consistent with forecasts from GigaOM Research, which expects the total worldwide addressable market for cloud computing to reach $158.8B by 2014, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011.

"Cloud computing is clearly providing the scalability and agility needed to drive business forward, so adoption continues to grow rapidly," said N. Louis Shipley, president and chief executive officer, VMTurbo. "Now companies need to focus on service assurance for the workloads they transition to the cloud-while maximizing ROI."

With the release of Operations Manager 4.0 earlier this month, VMTurbo enhanced its software-defined control system to ensure cloud and virtual environments are operating in their desired state, and that the infrastructure is being utilized as efficiently as possible. Highlighting automated decision-making, Operations Manager drives control to multiple layers of the IT stack by leveraging VMTurbo's Hybrid Cloud Extension and Storage Extension. The Hybrid Cloud Extension automatically determines what workloads should run in private or public cloud infrastructure.

Key findings from the survey include:

Agility and scalability cited for cloud deployments:

• More than half of respondents cited business agility (54.5 percent) and scalability (54.3 percent) as the main drivers;
• Cloud APIs are also cited as important this year as users look to move beyond stove pipe applications to more integrated business services.

Effectively managing complex IT environments to ensure ROI:

• At least as important to security, 46 percent described the management of IT as "more complex" with the growing use of cloud components, reflecting the immaturity of the cloud stack;
• Reliability (22.3 percent) and complexity (21 percent) were among the top inhibitors, reflecting real world obstacles to an "always-on" services infrastructure;
• Cost is up sharply as a perceived barrier - almost 50 percent year-over-year - and is now cited by 28 percent of respondents as all of the above factors weigh in;
• Over two-thirds (68 percent) see greater migration to the cloud as bringing equal or better total cost of ownership (TCO) to the organization.

Eyeing the hybrid cloud to meet business demands:

• In response to the inhibitors to cloud adoption, a majority of respondents (55 percent) expect hybrid or multi-cloud providers to emerge to challenge the current cloud ecosystem in the next 2-3 years;
• In five years, more than three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents expect hybrid clouds to be the core of their cloud strategies overtaking public and private clouds.

This year's survey finds several important shifts in why and how cloud computing is being used, obstacles to adoption, where cloud decision-making resides within organizations, and how the vendor landscape is changing.

Supporting Quotes:

"Clearly, even in the third year of our survey, we're still very early in the cloud-computing revolution. Yet the cloud formations we identified in last year's survey are clearly on an unstoppable rise," said Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. "Self-empowered consumers and businesses are taking the lead, and in many instances, regardless of IT. But IT is investing heavily both adapting internal infrastructure and adopting public infrastructure to respond on demand while managing the inevitable issues of compliance and regulation through hybrid approaches. And to realize the promise of the cloud, there is a clear call for the industry as a whole to help reduce complexity, and provide better interoperability."

Describing a vision of Bring Your Own Cloud services (BYOC) and the new reality of what Skok calls "Boundary-less" computing and "Out-servicing" he continued:

"Cloud services are being adopted and used in a "boundary-less" way where users are seamlessly integrating them at home and work across all their devices. And in an increasingly mobile pattern of business today companies are compelled to accept and adopt this BYOC model. In fact businesses themselves are adopting the boundary-less approach as they look to disintermediate and squeeze money from their value chains, focus on their core competencies and "out-service" (outsource non-core services) via the cloud. With all this in mind they are looking to gain competitive advantage from a core benefit of the cloud, namely continuous innovation by passing it along to their customers in the form of faster time to market and responsiveness to market needs." (For more, including industry predictions, see Skok's blog).

"Technology buyers expect cloud adoption will make managing IT increasingly complex, yet the plurality also expect overall better cost of ownership," said David Card, vice president of research at GigaOM. "That's either wishful thinking or an intriguing opportunity for suppliers and systems integrators."