"The disruptive impact of cloud is uprooting old industries and making way for new,” Landis said.
The Top 10 Transformational Impacts of the Cloud in 2013 are:
1. Cloud technologies will converge.
The cloud will continue to forge a massive convergence of technologies — similar to the evolution of the cell phone to the smart phone.2. Custom software will hit the cloud.
For years, everyone has been talking about the “low-hanging fruit” of commodity email and infrastructure.But non-commodity custom software is beginning to move to the cloud in a meaningful manner.3. Integration will become the new “killer app.”
The term “killer app” generally refers to the technology that’s so necessary it drives adoption of a computing paradigm. IT professionals will turn to cloud services brokers to manage the growing complexity problem by integrating heterogeneous infrastructure services; whereas software developers will turn to Platform as a Service (PaaS) for integrating disparate Web services to deliver seamless user experiences to their customers.4. India and outsourcing countries will drive industry adoption of PaaS worldwide.
In 2013, PaaS will be adopted by companies in India and in other major outsourcing countries in a rapid and notable fashion. It will cause a ripple effect throughout industry because these outsourcing companies are so integral to modern business operations. The cloud makes geographic boundaries irrelevant.5. Major data centers will go undergo a “survival-of-the-fittest” scenario.
Winners will emerge in the data center shakeout, as many large data centers will close and sell assets, or become acquired and consolidate. Cloud services brokerages will play a larger role for data center service providers to help their customers sort out the confusion and effectively manage an increasing number of cloud service providers.6. Health IT will adopt PaaS to replace niche “dinosaur” apps.
“The problem with health IT is that the enterprise systems have grown too large to merely replace, but there are limits to what they can do,” Landis said. “For the healthcare industry to move forward and achieve the goals set out in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, the cloud must play a major role in the next generation of healthcare IT. Healthcare CIOs are looking at how much it will cost to upgrade their HITECH-compliant systems — and they are finding that proprietary models will leave them with unfavorable lock-in, while others in the healthcare industry embracing the cloud march forward.”7. Organizations will rapidly adopt cloud services brokerages.
The need to use multiple cloud services providers to manage multiple functions will create a fast adoption of the cloud services brokerage model: either via a new internal role or external source, like the NJVC Cloudcuity Management Portal.8. The U.S. government will re-think major IT contracts.
Large system integrators, whose success long depended on very expensive, highly complex and customized, on-premise solutions, will redefine their practices and their overall operating and profit models, especially as more businesses go beyond basic, "out-of-the-box" cloud services and turn to the cloud for more customized implementations. U.S. government agencies will begin to add new requirements to several major IT contracts.9. Innovation and entrepreneurship will hit overdrive.
Entrepreneurship will go into overdrive, especially as full-featured, "idea-to-revenue" platforms take developers from concept to development and to deployment and sales. This will trigger a new wave of innovation, entrepreneurship and disruptive startups that will make things interesting for system integrators.10. Cloud adoption will move from an option to a "must have."
Cloud adoption will move away from something buyers purchase with surplus budget money to a “must have” that replaces the traditional IT enterprise business model. The cloud's value can only be fully realized when traditional and more costly ways of storing, using and securing data are replaced with new business models that take advantage of "fast-and-lean" cloud services. "In the coming year, companies will accomplish this by halting old projects, re-thinking old contracts, and shifting funds to affordable and innovative cloud services that can transform the IT enterprise," Landis said.Image from Shutterstock
