2012 Is The Year The Cloud Becomes Mature

Based on the very high interest in this blog and its cloud predictions we are planning to host a Forrester Teleconference entiteled "2012 — The Year The Cloud Matures: A Deeper Dive Into 10 Cloud Predictions For The Upcoming Year" on February 28th, 1-2pm EST/6-7pm UK time, where we will highlight and go through the 10 below predictions one by one. For more details and registration please follow the link to the: teleconference web page.

1. Multicloud becomes the norm

As companies quickly adopt a variety of cloud resources, they’ll increasingly have to address working with several different cloud solutions, often from different providers. By the end of 2012, cloud customers will already be using more than 10 different cloud apps on average. Cloud orchestration will become a big topic and an opportunity for service providers.

2. The Wild West of cloud procurement is over

While 2011 still witnessed different stakeholders within a company brokering (sometimes unsanctioned by IT) a lot of cloud deals, most companies will have established their formal cloud strategy by the end 2012, including the business models between IT and lines of business for their own, private cloud resources.

3. Cloud commoditization is creeping up the stack

The Oil And Gas Information Technology Innovation Dilemma

The hydrocarbon logistics chain of natural gas and crude oil connects globally distributed exploration and production sites with industrial and private consumers via pipelines, tankers, rail cars, and trucks with massive intermediate buffering storage and conversion facilities (tank farms, refineries, gas plants); it is the lifeblood of our energy supply chain today and for the coming decades.

More than 75 million barrels of oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas are produced, transported, and consumed all over the globe — every day. Along the complex transportation chain, these special bulk products, both liquids and gases, are transferred between the different modes of transportation, resulting in a number of challenges based on complex measurements of product volumes and masses:

• Measurement accuracy. In an ideal world, we would always determine the mass of crude oil and natural gas at each measurement point; however, due to the large quantities involved, weighing is possible only at the very end of the logistics chain. Consequently, we have to live with measurement data that typically carries an uncertainty of 0.1% to 0.5 %, depending on the measurement devices’ intrinsic accuracy.

The lines are blurring between software and services — with the rise of cloud computing, that trend has accelerated faster than ever. But customers aren’t just looking at cloud business models, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), when they want more flexibility in the way they license and use software. While in 2008 upfront perpetual software licenses (capex) made up more than 80% of a company’s software license spending, this percentage will drop to about 70% in 2011. The other 30% will consist of different, more flexible licensing models, including financing, subscription services, dynamic pricing, risk sharing, or used license models.

Forrester is currently digging deeper into the different software licensing models, their current status in the market, as well as their benefits and challenges. We kindly ask companies that are selling software and/or software related services to participate in our ~20-minute Online Forrester Research Software Licensing Survey, letting us know about current and future licensing strategies. Of course, all answers are optional and will be kept strictly confidential. We will only use anonymous, aggregated data in our upcoming research report, and interested participants can get a consolidated upfront summary of the survey results if they chose to enter an optional email address in the survey.

Yesterday SAP announced its Q4 and full year 2010 revenue results.

 It's nice to see that SAP has managed the turnaround to leave the recession behind and pick up growth again. The company reported a strong 34% SW revenue growth in Q4 2010 as compared with the previous year - "The strongest software sales quarter in SAP's history" as stated by Co-CEO Bill McDermott. However, one has to keep in mind that one year ago SAP was in deep crisis and reported a YoY -15% SW revenue decline in Q4 2009 followed by the departure of CEO Léo Apotheker in February 2010 and other subsequent executive changes.

Indeed Q4 2010 was the strongest SW sales quarter in SAP's history but the fourth quarter is always the strongest in SAP's annual sales cycle. Actually Q4 SW revenue declined for 2 years since 2007 (€1,4 billion) to 2008 (€1,3 billion) to 2009 (€1,1 billion), and it was about time to turn around the curve again. While Q4 2010 was the best SW revenue quarter, the full year 2010 was still not the best in SAP's history. In 2007, SAP reported total SW revenues of $3,4 billion, followed by 2008 (€3,6 billion), 2009 (€2,6 billion), and now total SW revenue 2010 with €3,3 billion – SW revenues are still below the level of 2007! While total revenue (€12,5 billion) looks to be back on track, net new SW license revenue still remains a challenging point in SAP's balance sheet!

The new Q4 2010 revenue announcement is a very positive and promising signal, but the company needs to continue to innovate its portfolio to accelerate again new SW revenues for long-term sustained growth.

Please leave a comment or contact me directly.

Are you interested in business intelligence, wonder about the future of the analytics market or have a question on advanced analytics technologies?

Then join the Forrester analysts Rob Karel, Boris Evelson, Clay Richardson, Gene Leganza, Noel Yuhanna, Leslie Owens, Suresh Vittal, William Frascarelli, David Frankland, Joe Stanhope, Zach Hofer-Shall, Henry Peyret and myself for an interactive TweetJam on Twitter about the state of advanced analytics on Wednesday, December 15^th, 2010 from 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT (18:00 – 19:00 CET) using the Twitter hashtag #dmjam. We’ll share the results of our recent research on the analytics market space and discuss how it will change with new technologies entering the scene and maturing over time.

Business intelligence is the fastest growing software market today as companies are driving business results based on deeper insights and better planning, and advanced analytics is the spearhead of BI technologies that can untap new dimensions of business performance. But what exactly is ‘advanced’ analytics, what technologies are available and how to efficiently use them?

Much more detailed information can be found in the blog of Forrester analyst James Kobielus who will lead us through the discussion during the TweetJam. Above you see an overview graphic listing the different elements of advanced analytics today, taken from his blog.

Here are some of the questions we want to debate during our TweetJam discussion:

• What exactly is and isn’t advanced analytics?
• What are the chief business applications of advanced analytics?