Summary Bullets:
- With enterprises consuming an increasing proportion of their IT resources through the cloud, the ability of a provider to offer multiple elements of the cloud stack is an immediate differentiator.
- Top IaaS and PaaS providers are expanding outside of their comfort zones to deliver more complex, multilayered solutions that meet multiple needs within a customer organization.
The need to access next-generation data management, analytics, high-performance and scalable infrastructure, and application development and deployment technologies from a single source is driving interest in providers that can deliver the complete cloud stack. The IT department’s need to centralize management and security of new and traditional applications migrating to the cloud is prompting a keen interest in having access to both the IaaS and PaaS components of the cloud stack.
Cloud growth is driving DevOps cloud services that offer the middleware stack along with automated provisioning, including elasticity to support the infrastructure required to develop and deploy enterprise applications with significantly increased ease and agility. From an operational perspective, PaaS eases the burden of managing the underlying infrastructure necessary to support enterprise applications by speeding and simplifying the deployment of systems, including servers, database, network and operating system.
Cloud providers eager to tap into demand for dynamic IT services want to replicate the success of cloud pioneers Amazon and Google. Current Analysis has just completed a Market Advisory Report on this trend within the cloud market segment, including a report card on leading cloud providers: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com.
Current Analysis’ 2014 Enterprise Investment Plans Survey shows most organizations use IaaS (60%), and half are using PaaS and SaaS offerings as well (49% and 49%, respectively). Having completed data center consolidation projects, enterprises are looking to make good on their investments by moving traditional applications to the cloud as well as developing new advanced applications, as customers move to a new business era.
Cloud Trends for 2015:
- Industry momentum behind cloud standards, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry Foundation and OpenShift, will help assure enterprises that cloud interoperability will be a prominent focus among cloud providers, helping to ensure continued PaaS adoption. Enterprises and SPs will look for cloud offerings which will make it easier to deploy application workloads in the cloud and also safeguard against dreaded vendor lock-in.
- Competitive pricing will be driven by reductions among popular cloud providers including AWS and Google. Most enterprise cloud providers have expressed their intensions to follow suit on price reductions dictated by leading offerings, or risk losing customers to lower-cost options.
- Next-generation applications will continue to leverage emerging technologies available through various PaaS offerings, including continued rollout of heterogeneous languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP and runtime environment node.JS, which runs apps written in JavaScript, as well as containerization technology such as that provided through Docker, automating app deployment through software containers.
- Partnerships will continue among application platform competitors including Microsoft, SAP, IBM and others, which are setting aside their differences in order to help promote offerings around the still-emerging cloud market. Competitors are partnering to provide customers with cloud choices, while these vendors are still able to promote their own PaaS, MEAP, business applications and pre-built templates.
IT Connection 