The cloud chicken-and-egg dynamic
How many companies are in the market to support the cloud? In doing research for an upcoming report I’m busy categorizing and assessing the plethora of companies emerging to support cloud – both public and private. At last count I identify 35 companies targeting cloud management. Throw in the VirtSec players and we have close to 50 companies; all aiming to provide a more manageable and secure cloud. What’s startling about this is we still see cloud (IaaS and PaaS) adoption (for production workloads) around 1-2% of enterprises. This raises a classic chicken-and-egg question: Is a mature cloud support market necessary to grow a mature cloud computing market or vice versa?
I believe the answer is yes. These two markets must evolve together to support each other rather than one happening first. Just look at adoption dynamics. Concerns over security, compliance, governance, availability, portability, and privacy are holding back cloud computing adoption. These are the exact issues this third-party ecosystem addresses. I’m calling this conglomeration of supporting players the Cloud Support Ecosystem (CSE).
Both markets are maturing – rapidly. There are millions of VC dollars going into this CSE and we’re already seeing consolidation, one of the first signs of a mature market. Just look at CA’s acquisitions of Cassatt, Oblicore and NetQoS; EMC’s acquisition of ConfigureSoft, FastScale and Archer; HP’s acquisition of iBrix; and, IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi. All in the past year! The bottom line: Over the next year we should see strong growth as these two markets evolve together.
