Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software, said: “Cloud computing promises to tackles two hitherto irreconcilable IT challenges: the need to reduce costs and the need to boost innovation.
“It takes a lot of effort from vendors and enterprises to actually make it work, and they will succeed in making it work in 2013, both on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems.”
It goes without saying that all the different versions of cloud computing have gathered momentum as they become widely used - for example public, private and hybrid clouds.
Lachal added: “Cloud computing has barely reached the adolescence phase and it will take at least another five years for cloud computing to mature into adulthood.”
The technology analyst company also interestingly forecasts that 2013 will see the emergence of cloud computing ecosystem. Public clouds are increasingly approached not only as technology delivery platforms but also as “ecosystem hubs” for cloud service providers and consumers.
Lachal commented: “They offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile solution ecosystems of the Internet age. Some industry sectors are benefiting from the “data centre as a hub”, an increasingly cloud computing-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data centre such as around financial exchanges, web and online services, or media content.”
A lot of data is generated by cloud services, and the (social, mobile) applications that cloud platforms form the foundations of, in turn require cloud services and applications to make sense of it.
This trend, argues Ovum, makes data to be the new cloud computing oil in 2013.
“Some vendors played the cloud data card early , but the cloud data production, brokerage, and consumption ecosystem is still in the making and will continue to evolve over the next five years,” concluded Lachal.
