William Fellows of 451 Group
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The opening keynote Tuesday morning at HCTS 2011 was delivered by William Fellows of 451 Group, who offered a presentation that followed up on Monday’s talk by Antonio Piraino, delivering more insight into the enterprise cloud market.
He began by introducing the CoudScape research practice at 451, a kind of interdisciplinary cloud research project that incorporates a lot of information from a variety of other research practices within 451. One of the early functions of CloudScape was developing a fairly simple working definition of the cloud, which I won’t relate precisely – partly because it went by pretty quickly, and partly because it’s more or less what you think it is (the definition, I mean).
He offers some data about the cloud market, breaking it apart into segments, making the important point that software as a service takes up a huge chunk of the cloud spending (something in the three quarters range).
Among the market that remains, infrastructure as a service is the huge (two-thirds) share. And within IaaS, Amazon occupies more than half of the market share (although other real challengers are emerging in the form of Rackspace, Verizon/Terremark, and others).
The PaaS market is a little more competitive, and evenly distributed.
The European cloud market is about a year behind the US one, although there are a few significant differences in the way of stricter regulations, and far less homogenous conditions among European countries.
In Europe, like in the US, he says, government has become an unlikely champion for the cloud.
He also looks quickly at a large and growing market of technologies he describes as “cloud enablement” products, most of them software around things like virtualization.
Fellows pulled up some data from The Info Pro, interview data revealing some of the drivers for business getting onto public cloud. The major driver listed is cost reduction. However, the key driver for ongoing cloud adoption is flexibility. The interesting point here is that cost reduction and flexibility are both equally important facets of your cloud offering.
Interestingly, security rates as fourth on his list of barriers to cloud adoption, behind change/learning, complexity and cost.
He brings up a list of case studies, which I won’t relate in detail, but I will say they broadly illustrate the conditions in enterprise adoption of the cloud, and specifically illustrate some of the concerns and drivers he has already discussed.
In discussing private cloud, he brings up some of its limitations, but stresses that it’s an easier first step for a lot of enterprise customers who won’t throw workloads into the public cloud at first. This, he says, is one of the biggest arguments in favor of the hybrid cloud model, which might just provide those tentative enterprises with an easier path into those public cloud services.
Looking at opportunities for service providers, he brings up the point that Amazon’s April 21 outage may have created an opportunity for other service providers in the cloud space, because it created an environment where customers were more aware of the risks of having all their eggs in one basket. Not that Amazon customers are dying to jump ship, necessarily, but many of them are looking for backup plans, or diversification. It created more room for competition.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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