Besides releasing their annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, research and consulting firm Gartner also made some predicitons about the growth of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in 2015.
Gartner states that worldwide spending on Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service will grow to 32.8 Percent in 2015 reaching almost 16.5 billion US dollar. Analyst Lydia Leong states that the IaaS solution ecosystem is rapidly consolidating around a small numer of maket leaders.
“The sky is not falling — customers are getting great value out of cloud IaaS — but the competitive landscape is shifting,” Ms. Leong said. “Few providers have the financial resources to invest in being broadly competitive in the cloud IaaS market.”
According to Gartner, organizations must operate in two essential modes, which Gartner calls bimodel IT.
Bimodal IT refers to having two modes of IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way. Mode 1 is traditional, emphasizing scalability, efficiency, safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is nonsequential, emphasizing agility and speed.
Initially, most businesses adopt cloud IaaS for Mode 2, agile IT projects that may be peripheral to the organization’s IT needs, but may have a high business impact. This affects sourcing: Mode 2 adoption is often business-led, driven by business managers who hold the budget, need greater agility and have shorter time frames than IT operations are able to accommodate.
Over time, as a business becomes more comfortable with the use of cloud IaaS, it will be used in Mode 1, traditional IT projects as well, usually mirroring the past decade’s adoption pattern of virtualization in the data center. Many businesses, especially in the midmarket, will eventually migrate away from running their own data centers in favor of relying primarily on infrastructure in the cloud.