Author: Mike West

Today’s economic situation continues to favor the Cloud, driven by businesses that are reshaping themselves. The Cloud – including SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and Cloud Services – will drive increasing business and IT activity, resulting in hybrid architectures to manage and a new Cloud IT mission. Though most business enterprises may lag in embracing both PaaS and IaaS, partly because Public Cloud lacks formal standards, Private Clouds are increasingly of interest, especially to larger enterprises. Meanwhile, PaaS is still very immature, and not yet “enterprise ready” for serious, mainstream development, but will evolve.

Through 2015, SaaS will continue to dominate spending, including Cloud IT, social networking and mobility solutions, key aspects of the boundary-free enterprise. Integration and workflow in the cloud – primarily with on-premise systems – will remain a critical capability.  Cloud services providers (specifically, pure-play Cloud System Integrators as well as traditional service providers aggressively pursuing the Cloud) will also flourish – as they embrace SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS – serving both ISVs migrating to the Cloud and enterprises reshaping themselves. Through 2015, the Cloud IT industry will itself transform and consolidate, while SaaS plays its central role.

These are among the core findings in Saugatuck Technology’s latest 24-page research analysis report on Cloud IT adoption: Key SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS Trends Through 2015 – Business Transformation via the Cloud (834SSR, 18Jan2011 – see Note 1). Released today via Saugatuck’s Website, the study builds on Saugatuck’s analysis of global survey data, interviews with experienced user organization executives, and insights from briefings with leading Cloud providers – to build a realistic, working model of Cloud IT adoption, evolution and, most importantly, its transformative effect upon enterprises large and small.

Key research highlights from this report include the following:

• By 2015, there will remain no business computing category that hasn’t moved to the Cloud.
• The hybrid business portfolio will be dominated by Cloud solutions in 2015, as the on-premise segment transforms from the driver of transactions to the repository of business data.
• Through 2014, 65 percent of Private Cloud deployments will be packaged vendor offerings delivered as a drop-in appliance.
• System Integrators of all sizes and flavors will increasingly be the key drivers of innovation in terms of enabling enterprise customers to migrate new and existing workloads and make their Cloud solutions work effectively.

Please view the full article here