Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Matt Fates, Partner at Ascent Venture Partners
2015 – The Year of the Cloud
According to IDC predictions, cloud services are expected to
accelerate in 2015 with $118 billion in spending on the greater cloud
ecosystem. Conversations with IT decision makers
across companies large and small, within many different industries, indicate
that the level of adoption advanced significantly in 2014.
Not only are the vast majority of
companies now using numerous SaaS applications, but mission critical IT
resources are increasingly moving to cloud platforms. With this momentum, it
seems 2015 will be the year that ‘utility computing' - or buying IT just as you
would electricity - will become more the norm among corporate users. An IDG
study suggests that in the past two years, the percentage of enterprises with
either applications or infrastructure running in the cloud has gone from just
12 percent to an enormous 69 percent. And 62 percent of IT professionals claim
that roughly a third of their IT systems are now cloud-based. Verizon recently
reported that enterprise spending on cloud is up 38 percent year over year.
These numbers show the extreme proliferation of cloud adoption both this year
as well as in the year to come.
We are seeing an expanding
ecosystem developing around these cloud platforms. The shift to outsourced
cloud-based providers means businesses need entirely new management systems for
costs, security, performance, fault tolerance, reporting, and the list goes on. Each one of these categories is a
multi-billion-dollar market within traditional IT, and each will be transformed
as it moves to the cloud.
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About the Author
Matt Fates, Partner
Matt joined the Ascent team in 2002 to
continue his work with innovative early stage enterprise IT companies. Over the
last decade at Ascent, Matt has focused on investments in data analytics, cloud
business services and security. He was a double major in computer science and
economics at Yale University and has been a self-described "geek for a long
time." He found computer programming to be addictive but realized the business
side of the tech world was more his strength and earned an MBA from the Tuck
School of Business at Dartmouth (Tuck Scholar).
Matt
has worked with emerging technology companies since 1996. He started his career
at Alex Brown & Sons, where he helped execute both equity and M&A
transactions, working with companies such as BBN, CIENA, DSET, RSA Security and
SwitchBoard.com. He
then moved to Norwest Venture Partners, where he worked on venture investments
such as Broadband Access Systems (acquired by ADC Telecom), Gold Wire
Technology (acquired by Intelliden), and COSpace (acquired by InterNAP).