State of the Cloud: Three Snapshots
People often ask me is cloud computing really being adopted? Over the years I’ve talked to large and small companies to find out the state of the art in their particular businesses. I've been tracking a number of enterprises and will share one example here. If you're interested in more just connect. This is a mid-sized company, with around $300M in revenue.
In 2008, they predominately used application cloud services, in particular: Oracle On-demand, RightNow (later purchased by Oracle), ADP, and Trovix. In addition, the company was using an operations management cloud service Postini for spam filtering security management.
By 2010, the company had added a few other application cloud services, such as WebEx, Salesforce, and SumTotal. The company also deployed an application called Serengeti, which is a specialized piece of software for the legal side of the business. Finally, the company deployed another operations management cloud service from Qualsys.
By 2014, there was considerably more movement into the adoption of cloud services. For instance, you see here a lot of additional application cloud services including Office 365 and Workiva. The company also started using BlackDuck for software development cloud services.
You can also see the company began to use compute and storage cloud services from Windows Azure, as well as two data center cloud services provided by Peer 1 Hosting and Raging Wire.
The trends you see in this particular case are similar to other companies, even much larger ones. First, there is a continued expansion of usage of all cloud services. Second, unlike the move to client-server computing, adoption here has started at the application level first. In other words, enterprise adoption of cloud services has begun by subscribing to independent software vendor (ISV) business applications delivered in either model four, five or six. For a more detailed explanation of the seven business models see Part 1 and Part 2.
What remains is increasing adoption of compute, storage, software development and operations management cloud services. We’re still very early days, but if the trend I’ve seen over the past six years is any indication, by 2021 the picture will be dramatically different.
p.s. That's a photo taken last week in Silicon Valley. So we all still have a way to go.
Tim that's a nice time elapsed snapshot of one company. In my analysis of SAP customers in my book SAP Nation I found several 'coping'strategies to escape the financial burden. The unadopters are either going third party maintenance or for sub$ 5 bn co going with SaaS options. Larger 'diversifiers' are ring fencing SAP with salesforce, workday, e2open, Ariba etc in functional areas or using Netsuite, Microsoft in 2 tier settings. So if I had a similar time elapsed snapshot you would see erosion of on premise ERP/CRM/SCM
Dead on target. Good cloud is cheaper, better, easier to improve and usually built with a competitive eye on the existing solutions. If done well it just wins.