GlassHouse joins North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM Research and industry collaborators to unveil results of 2013 Future of Cloud Computing Survey

This year’s survey is the largest to date, examining viewpoints on drivers, inhibitors and opportunities in cloud computing across a sample of 855 respondents, including business users, IT decision makers and cloud vendors. As security fears begin to subside, unsurprisingly, cloud adoption has continued to rise in 2013, with nearly 75% of respondents using some form of cloud platform – an increase of 8% on 2012.

Michael Skok, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners commented: “clearly, even in the third year of our survey, we're still very early in the cloud-computing revolution. Yet the cloud formations we identified in last year’s survey are clearly on an unstoppable rise. Self-empowered consumers and businesses are taking the lead, and in many instances, regardless of IT.

But IT is investing heavily both adapting internal infrastructure and adopting public infrastructure to respond on demand while managing the inevitable issues of compliance and regulation through hybrid approaches. And to realise the promise of the cloud, there is a clear call for the industry as a whole to help reduce complexity, and provide better interoperability.”

Although SaaS remains the most popular form of cloud service, strongest growth was recorded in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which saw a 29% increase over the previous year. Interestingly, the number who felt the cloud would lead to lower spending (one of the primary factors for initial cloud adoption back in the mid-2000s) fell by nearly half, down to 10%, and the number who believed spending would increase more than tripled to 30%.
Kevin Beadon, Head of Workspace Strategies at GlassHouse added, “The growth in IaaS aligns with what respondents saw as the fastest growing cloud companies; naming Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Rackspace, all providers of cloud infrastructure, as the top four cloud companies.”

“The growth in BYOD and changes to work place strategies are both areas that we are noticing as gathering pace too; therefore it comes as no surprise that IaaS is now representing the most lucrative area of the ‘as a Service’ line. The 2013 survey also highlights the gulf between the initial predictions of the mid-2000s, and the reality regarding the primary benefits for deploying cloud. The ability to stay agile; scale an organization rapidly; innovate and a desire to change fixed capital costs to operating expenditures are now the key driving forces behind cloud adoption.”

David Card, Vice President of Research, GigaOM finished: “technology buyers expect cloud adoption will make managing IT increasingly complex, yet the plurality also expect overall better cost of ownership. That's either wishful thinking or an intriguing opportunity for suppliers and systems integrators."

“Cloud services are being adopted and used in a “boundary-less” way where users are seamlessly integrating them at home and work across all their devices. And in an increasingly mobile pattern of business today companies are compelled to accept and adopt this BYOC model. In fact businesses themselves are adopting the boundary-less approach as they look to disinter mediate and squeeze money from their value chains, focus on their core competencies and “out-service” (outsource non-core services) via the cloud.

“With all this in mind they are looking to gain competitive advantage from a core benefit of the cloud, namely continuous innovation by passing it along to their customers in the form of faster time to market and responsiveness to market needs,” Skok finished.