The Yankee Group recently held an interesting webinar on cloud computing that looked at how the widely talked about technology will fare in 2010. It got together analyst Agatha Poon with cloud computing experts from Microsoft, Sybase and Arista to talk about a number of issues, including:
- What is cloud: evolution or revolution? Interestingly opinion from Yankee Group's enterprise survey was split down the middle. It encouraging to see that2% of enterprises thought cloud computing was hype with no substance. The webinar participants agreed that although it is evolutionary, there are some revolutionary aspects to cloud computing;
- What are the cloud's characteristics? It's important not to get too hung up on definitions, but Yankee define it as dynamic, shared, scalable computing resources delivered over the Internet;
- Signposts for 2010. Cloud will make an appearance first in its private incarnation through the increase in virtualization. Also important is the development of trust between service provider and end-user;
- Is pay-as-you-go important for enterprises? Given that enterprise budgets are not set up for PAYG, is it so important to have this - should service providers in fact be offering more traditional contracts?
- What are the key barriers? Well they touch on the obvious ones like security and availability, but also the lack of management tools and interoperability.
- How much spending on services? Interestingly the Yankee Group believes that within 24 months 15% of enterprises will spend more than half of their budget on cloud computing services, which seems like a high figure to me.
Anyway to make up your own mind you can listen to a replay of the webinar here, and we will also be looking at the session in more depth in a forthcoming Enterprise Briefing story.
After a Masters in Computer Science, I decided that I preferred writing about IT rather than programming. My 20-year writing career has taken me to Hong Kong and London where I've edited and written for IT, business and electronics publications. In 2002 I co-founded Futurity Media with Stewart Baines where I continue to write about a range of topics such as unified communications, cloud computing and enterprise applications.