Most analysts covering the software space predict that 2010 will be the year of the cloud. There’s certainly no shortage of theories circulating about how quickly enterprise software organizations will adopt the cloud, and it’s notable that Salesforce.com passed a major milestone recently in hitting the $1 billion revenue mark.
Just a quick glance at the truly established cloud players like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com — not to mention other cloud advocates like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Rackspace, and VMWare — and you can see what direction the software industry is tilting. For those who are interested in digging deeper, Cloudtweaks.com presents a pretty comprehensive list of 85 Cloud Computing Vendor Players.
To get some perspective on the cloud today, I highly recommend this excellent article from M.R. Rangaswami titled 2010: The Year to Crystallize Cloud Strategy. It lays out a thoughtful and well reasoned perspective on the cloud today. I agree with all his main points that enterprises will adopt a hybrid approach to the cloud, using it as an extension to their existing datacenters, while SMBs will be much quicker to jump in with customer facing cloud offerings.
Rangaswami also predicts that open source software is well positioned to grow alongside the cloud, as the majority of current cloud offerings are already based on open source software stacks. Lastly, he points out that Cloud-Standards.org is building an impressive list of standards development to regulate cloud activities.
Notwithstanding the software industry’s tendency to see new trends around every corner, all the indicators I see point to a continued growth of cloud platforms and services in the coming year. To quote Steve Ballmer in a New York Times interview, “Anything that has been a server needs to be a service.”
