The web hosting industry has found itself at the epicenter of the cloud computing earthquake that is shaking the foundation of IT. Aside from the unconventional and progressive thinking at Amazon, the leaders in cloud computing have come from our very own like Rackspace, Softlayer, and Servepath/GoGrid (Of note, in this and related posts I am only referring to Infrastructure-as-a-Service within the “cloud” taxonomy.”) Furthermore, over the last quarter we have seen a mushrooming of cloud-related announcements from the likes of China Telecom, Host Europe, Hosting.com, iomart, KDDI, LayeredTech, Navisite, Terremark, ThePlanet, and Verizon to name but a few.
Given all the buzz, I took the opportunity to survey Parallels Partners on their plans surrounding infrastucture cloud services. The sample size was 30 and the 70% of the respondents were at the CEO/President/Founder level, with the remaining 30% spread pretty evenly across Operations/Engineering, Business Development/Strategy, and Marketing.
And without any further ado, here are the results, which suggest there’s (not surprisingly) a significant amount of interest in offering infrastructure cloud services, yet (somewhat surprisingly) a lack of corresponding plans to get to market.
The biggest take-away here is that if there is an easy and quick way to get to market with infrastructure cloud services, many hosting service providers would be quite interested.
In the next two posts, I will look at some of the other results. Namely, what market segments are expected to adopt infrastructure cloud services and what workloads run best on cloud services.
About Joshua Beil
Joshua Beil (@joshbeil) is the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels, the leading provider of automation and virtualization software to the web hosting community. Previously, Josh was the Director of Social Media & Technology at a Level 3 Communications [Nasdaq: LVLT] where he provided strategic and tactical sales support. Before that, Josh was CEO and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, Inc, the largest commercial WiFi service provider in Hawaii. He was named one of Pacific Business News' Forty Under 40 for 2006, and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. Before co-founding Skywave, Mr. Beil was VP of Research and Development for the market research boutique, Tier 1 Research, where he covered the Internet infrastructure sector as an analyst, and negotiated and sold subscriptions to Tier 1's research services. Josh has also previously served as the Senior Analyst for Exodus Communications as well as the internationally known market research firm, IDC. He holds a Certificate in E-Business from UCSC Extension, and he graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a major in Psychology.
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