SNW: Notes from the Cloud Summit
By admin - Last updated: Friday, April 10, 2009 - Save & Share - Leave a Comment
At this year’s SNW, I attended the Cloud Summit held on Monday afternoon, April 6. The speakers included Analysts and End-Users. Please enjoy my notes.
IDC predictions and data:
- Cloud adoption and growth are predicted to outpace growth of other spending over the next 3 years; CAGR of ~5%
- Cloud is expected to represent 25% of incremental new project spending by 2012
- $6.8B spent on SaaS in 2008; SaaS included in Cloud spending predictions
- 30% of organizations surveyed by IDC report using Cloud/SaaS in some form today
- 76% are working on active projects to adopt cloud computing
- The highest adoption rates for SaaS/Cloud are for CRM, HR, Collaboration Travel Expense and Sales Incentive applications
Key drivers for cloud adoption:
- Brisk pace of technology turnover and change
- High cost of capital
- Need to keep SLAs constant while staffing levels fluctuate
- Infrastructure spending this year is predicted to be relatively flat, up only .5% for all of 09
- Infrastructure spending is expected to increase in 2010 by 4.6%
- Worldwide infrastructure spending in 09 is expected to total of $367B for non-cloud/SaaS and $16B for SaaS; increasing to $438B and $42B respectively in 2010
Healthcare implications:
- Cloud is the ‘dream’ platform - perhaps the only platform - capable to deliver the Electronic Health Record/Electronic Medical Record (EHR/EMR) with universal hospital/healthcare access according to the CIO at Schumacher Group
- My own observation: EMR/EHR is the ‘killer app’ for Cloud Computing
- 70% of hospitals outsource emergency medicine
- Schumacher is the third largest and fastest-growing emergency medicine provider
- Schumacher uses Cloud service providers, all of which are HIPPA-compliant
- Schumacher’s observation: vendors of his on-site infrastructure are not as hospital-aware/healthcare-aware as his Cloud vendors
VMware implications:
- Virtual Machine technology (like VMware) is a necessary component for enabling Cloud application provisioning
- Enterprises are starting with Cloud secondary storage provisioning as a first step such as for data backup and disaster recovery
- Likewise, SaaS models for application services are well understood and relatively easy to embrace for enterprise teams
- Enterprises are less clear on how to use Cloud for production data analysis/provisioning