Last week IDC announced availability of our new forecast for public IT Cloud services spending.  The new forecast replaces last October’s forecast.   In this post, I’ll share some highlights of the new forecast, which extends to 2014.

[The full report - including key assumptions and forecast data for all six years, segmented by five functional categories within eight regions/countries - is available to subscribers on idc.com.]

Scorching Growth and Shifting Category Spend

In total, spending on public IT cloud services (excludes private cloud spending) will grow from $16.5 billion in 2009 – a modest, recession-driven haircut from last year’s forecast – to over $55 billion in 2014. This is scorching fast growth of 27% per year.

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In a recent post, I shared users’ perceptions of cloud benefits and challenges from our most recent IDC IT Cloud Services Survey. In this post, I’ll show what these same IT and line-of-business executives say about their likeliness to adopt the cloud services model for different IT applications, workloads and services.

Once again, the survey was fielded, from the IDC Enterprise Panel of IT executives and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues.

Organizations Are Likely to Consider Cloud Delivery for Many IT Offerings

We asked the panel to rate their organizations’ likelihood – on a 1 (very unlikely) to 5 (very likely) scale – to pursue the cloud model for a variety of IT applications, workloads and services. The chart below shows the percentage of panelists responding 3, 4 or 5 – that is, neutral to very likely.

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On Thursday December 3rd, IDC released its big picture predictions for the IT and Telecommunications industry in 2010. Here are some links for more detail.

The Webcast – The recorded one-hour IDC Predictions 2010 telebriefing (simple registration required):>

The Document – The full “IDC Predictions 2010″ document:

• For IDC clients:

• For non-clients (simple registration required):

The Video – And here’s the 5-minute video summary:

Answers to Telebriefing Questions – On Thursday’s IDC Predictions webcast, our line to the On24 service dropped just a few questions into the Q&A session. We captured all the questions, and over the next several days we’ll post answers to those questions here on IDC eXchange. So stay tuned!

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Last year, we published IDC’s first forecast of IT cloud services, focusing on enterprise adoption of public cloud services in five big IT categories through 2012. For the past several months, dozens of IDC analysts have collaborated to refine, deepen and extend our cloud services forecasts. In this post, we share this year’s update of our top-level cloud services forecast, now extended through 2013. [The full forecast, including 2008 as well as 2010-2012, will be published shortly in IDC's Cloud Services: Global Overview subscription program.]

The New Forecast

Here is the new forecast, segmented by offering category, for 2009 and 2013:

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Last year, we published IDC’s “cloud services” definition, as the foundation for our forecast of IT Cloud Services spending – and to inject IDC’s point of view, as a rational market taxonomist, into a very crowded and confused debate about just what “the cloud” is all about.

After a full year of discussion and debate among key IDC analysts, We’ve continued to refine our thinking about what defines cloud services, and what makes them new and important.and conversations with hundreds of leading IT users and suppliers, we’ve continued to refine our thinking about what defines cloud services, and what makes them new and important. The revised definition is very consistent with last year’s definition, with improvements in two areas: 1) minor tweaking of cloud service “key attributes” to improve clarity, and 2) expansion of the definitional scope to accommodate both public and private cloud deployment models. [...read more...]

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In the past year, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with client and press about the emerging cloud services model, and its impact on the IT industry. As you might imagine, more than a few folks question whether the cloud services model will really be as pervasive and transforming as its proponents argue. The skeptics point, legitimately, to the many remaining challenges of cloud services adoption, particularly around security, availability, performance, limited customization, lack of standards, etc.

My response to the skeptics is very simple: within the next several years, none of those challenges will make a bit of difference to the vast majority of customers. [...read more...]

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One of the most common questions I’ve been asked in the past several months has been “How will the global recession impact the pace of adoption of Cloud Computing?”.

My gut reaction has been that the economic crunch would certainly amplify the economic benefits of the cloud services model, and therefore accelerate IT cloud services adoption. Some data from a user survey my colleague Stephen Minton published earlier this year substantiates that view. [...read more...]

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In Houston yesterday, I spoke about cloud computing at an IDC/Energy Insights gathering of IT executives from the Oil and Gas industry. It was a high-powered group, with 5 of the top 10 global energy companies represented (it’s been a big month for me with the Energy sector – a few weeks ago, in Milan, I met with the CIO of another of the top 10 global energy players, Eni S.p.A.).

The interest in cloud computing by these Energy industry IT leaders was strong – we had a lively 1-1/2 hour discussion, which could have easily gone on for twice the time. Here are some of the comments/questions that these execs had about cloud computing – they offer some interesting insights to the IT industry about how users are thinking about cloud computing right now, and what vendors should be focusing on to position for success in this industry transition: [...read more...]

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[UPDATE - Good news: looks like someone at Microsoft is hearing the same things from users that we're hearing. On Monday early a.m., Steve Martin posted that Microsoft was, after all, going to meet with the Open Cloud Manifesto group later that day.]

On Monday, 30+ IT vendors announced the creation of the “Open Cloud Manifesto” group, with a declared intent to “initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud computing community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles. We believe that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as all other IT technologies.”

Much has been made about the fact that IBM and the rest of this group were not able to convince key Cloud players – particularly Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft – to join in. One obvious reason: these companies are all rivals for a strategic control point in the cloud: the application platform. (To me, the interesting exception was SAP, which is among those competing at the application platform level in the cloud, but still signed on to the IBM-led Manifesto.)

Yes, this kind of IT vendor rivalry is as old as the IT industry. But anyone who’s listening to customers today (including – importantly – those not yet leveraging the cloud), knows that driving more agreement around cloud service interoperability and data portability is going to be a very important element in moving cloud computing “across the chasm“. [...read more...]

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Yesterday, as we had predicted, Microsoft finally announced its intent to become a major player in the rapidly-expanding cloud services market. Here’s a clip from IDC Directions last March, predicting the “big boots” (including Microsoft’s) that would be jumping into the Cloud Computing world this year.

We’ve written for several years about the unique opportunity Microsoft has to play a market-maker role in industry’s shift to the Cloud, particularly by helping its thousands of application solution and channel partners migrate to the Software-as-a-Service delivery model. [...read more...]

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