Predicting the future of cloud service providers

http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com/2015/04/predicting-the-future-of-cloud-service-providers/

Forty-seven percent of marketing departments will have 60 percent or more of their applications on a cloud platform in two years.

When asked which Value-Added Reseller (VAR) is most likely to win their enterprises' businessfor a significant hosting project, the majority said IBM (18 percent) followed by Microsoft (11 percent), Amazon (8 percent) and Dell (7 percent).

Database (57 percent), e-mail (54 percent) and business applications (ERP, CRM & industry-specific apps) (49 percent) are the three leading application hosting investments enterprises will be making in the next two years.

These and other insights are from Beyond Infrastructure: Cloud 2.0 Signifies New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers (66 pp., no opt-in) a report providing valuable insights into the Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) landscape. The study was conducted by 451 Research LLC and commissioned by Microsoft. Despite being vendor-sponsored, this study provides several useful take-aways on the broader MSP and CSP marketplace. Please see the first pages of the study for more on the methodology.

Key take-aways include the following:

• Enterprises' highest expectations when moving to hosted services or cloud computing is gaining improved technology quality on platforms and applications (22 percent), helping to grow the business (18 percent), improved availability and better business service (13 percent).  The following graphic analyzes the expectations enterprises have when moving to the cloud.

• Within two years, 34 percent of enterprises will have 60 percent or more of their applications on a cloud platform. 47 percent of marketing departments will have 60 percent or more of their applications on a cloud platform in two years.  These and other insights are from the graphic, Future Percent of Applications in Cloud by Department.

• Sixty-three percent of all enterprises surveyed are running an on-premises private cloud with a hosted private cloud. 45  percent using an on-premises private cloud with a public cloud. 32 percent have a hosted private cloud integrated to a public cloud. The following graphic shows the relative level of interoperability maturity across the three hybrid cloud scenarios 451 Research evaluated. MSPs and CSPs need to excel at mastering cloud interoperability and integration technologies to keep pace with the wide variety of enterprise needs in this area now and in the future.

• Security (35 percent), better control by IT teams (19 percent) and improved performance (17 percent) are the three most common factors driving enterprises to move workloads from public to private clouds.  It's interesting to note than only 14 percent of respondents see workload migrations from public to private clouds being cost driven and only 7 percent are seeing the shift due to IT centralization plans.

• Backup and Recovery (68 percent), Disaster Recovery/Site Recovery (54 percent),  Application development tools & platforms (47 percent) and Mobile Services (47 percent) are the four Managed Services enterprises anticipate investing the most in in the next two years. The following graphic provides an overview of forecasted spending on Managed Services over the next two years.

• Database (57 percent), e-mail (54 percent) and business applications (ERP, CRM & industry-specific apps) (49 percent) are the three leading application hosting investments enterprises will be making in the next two years. Analytics including Business Intelligence (BI), data mining and Big Data (41 percent) is the sixth-most mentioned area for future investment. The following graphic provides an overview of Application Hosting investment priorities over the next two years.

• When asked which Value-Added Reseller (VAR) is most likely to win their company's business for a significant hosting project, the majority said IBM (18 percent).  Microsoft (11 percent), Amazon (8 percent) and Dell (7 percent) were mentioned second through fourth. When asked which system integrator (SI) would most likely win a significant hosting project, IBM was mentioned most often (25 percent) followed by Microsoft (13 percent).  Please see the second graphic for the top-mentioned SIs.

• CIO/CTOs are the most influential C-level executives regarding purchasing decisions related to cloud-based Application Development and IT Operations/Administration apps.  CEOs are the most influential regarding cloud-based marketing app adoption.  The following two graphs illustrate the stakeholder decision making authority roles of C-level executives.

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This article was written by Louis Columbus from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.