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."