IDC: Cloud Computing to Be 10% of All IT Spend in 5 Years

IDC confirmed my amateur predictions that the current economic turmoil will indeed be very good for those looking to the cloud. Both from a user perspective, as well as a vendor perspective. In fact, IDC’s Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst, is predicting adoption will accelerate due to market pressures in a recent press release entitled IDC Finds Cloud Computing Entering Period of Accelerating Adoption and Poised to Capture IT Spending Growth Over the Next Five Years:

“A recent IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues shows that cloud services are ‘crossing the chasm’ and entering a period of widespread adoption. Moreover, IDC expects the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the current financial crisis. The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT – in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.”

The report goes on to cite that spending on IT cloud services will triple in the next 5 years, reaching $42 billion and capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year. With he overall IT market spend being $383 billion, this kind of growth validates that the opportunity deserves the attention it is getting.

IDC is also first to point out that its not just cloud vendors - the Amazons, Googles and Salesforces of the world will not get this pie exclusively. In fact, just as important are all the offerings that support the development, delivery and deployment of those consuming these services, which is the market Hyperic is in - bridging the gap for monitoring between the datacenter and the cloud

In fact, in the survey, two of the top 4 demands are areas that Hyperic is solving:

CloudStatus - providing real-time visibility into the health and availability of cloud providers, giving users a third-party perspective into SLAs

Hyperic HQ - providing real-time trending, analysis and control capabilities to maintain the performance of your web applications. This can run the gamut of possibilities from helping to improve the performance of your application, to making critical infrastructure architecture decisions quickly (e.g., spawning new virtualized resources or shifting loads from the cloud to your datacenter and vice-versa based on demand or performance changes).

I am sure there will continue to be pundits of all kinds of caliber, and while cloud computing may seem at times too much like inflated marketing-speak, the delivery model and innovative services that are powering this growth are unquestionable. Its nice to have some independent analyst numbers to back it up. Thanks Frank & all the rest of the IDC team for sharing this.

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