Amazon Web Services is rapidly growing

Since I joined Forrester 2 months ago, we have seen multiple announcements from public cloud providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) numbers are now available. As reported by The Motley Fool, “at the RE:Invent  conference a company representative disclosed “AWS is now on pace for a run rate of $7.3 billion — up 81% year over year”. Current market leader AWS, followed by Microsoft Azure and IBM, have confirmed that cloud for many enterprises is not only an option; it is the default for new initiatives for many enterprises. A “cloud first” policy is now commonplace in many enterprises.

 

Public Cloud adoption is the norm

The adoption of public cloud for production workloads continues to grow. Plenty of evidence exists to support this trend, including Forrester’s Business Technographics® data. A poll of attendees on day 2 at the recent ISACA EuroCACS conference in Copenhagen identified that almost 36% of respondents are using public cloud for production workloads.

 

ISACA EuroCACS Polling Question

Are you using public cloud for production workload?

Respondents

%

Yes

55

36%

No

90

58%

Planning to use in the next 12 months

9

6%

Total Respondents

154

 

 

The reality is that while cloud was being used for development and test, it is now being leveraged for production workloads especially for modern user experience leveraging mobile, social and web that require elasticity.

 

Google is “cloud” serious

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO announced in November that Google is serious about cloud when he announced the formation of a single Cloud team led by industry veteran Diane Greene. The team led by Greene, long time industry veteran and VMware cofounder, will lead the all the cloud businesses, including Google for Work, Cloud Platform, and Google Apps with the business self-contained including product, engineering, marketing and sales.  

Clearly, Google is looking to take advantage of the changing paradigm of compute.

Google already has a presence in the Cloud arena including its Google Cloud Platform. The focus of the cloud business is to channel its resources to create serious momentum in the market. Now the journey to success will not be overnight. That said, with its resources that include people and cash, application stack offerings and market awareness it has the components to differentiate and compete in this rapidly growing market.

 

Watch out AWS!

AWS, Microsoft, IBM and the other cloud vendors should be concerned with this new entrant into the market. That said, they all have the advantage of being established. Also, without investing in innovation and moving beyond the highly commoditized Infrastructure as a Service play, they too could be in a discount spiral that could be a feature of Cloud in 2016. 

 

The winner will be the consumer

The real winner here will be the consumer of cloud services. With the refocused entry of Google, not only will there be continued price pressure, the acceleration of innovation will accelerate, making public cloud an even larger component of your compute workload options.

 

If you are looking for more information on the cloud computing landscape, you may wish to review the recently published TechRadar™ Cloud Computing, Q4, 2015

 

So the question is “where are you in your #cloud journey” and “how soon will you consider Google as a public cloud alternative”?

 

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter: @RobertEStroud