This year’s IDC IT cloud services survey reveals many of the same perceptions about cloud benefits and challenges as seen in last year’s survey. But there are a few interesting shifts this year, driven largely by: 1) budget pressure from the challenging economy, and 2) a growing sophistication in users’ understanding of cloud services.

This year’s survey was fielded, like last year’s, from the IDC Enterprise Panel of IT executives and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues. The respondent population is very similar to that of last year’s survey, validating comparisons with last year’s results.

Economics and Adoption Speed Still Top Benefits; Standardization Moves Up

This year’s survey shows, once again, that economic benefits are key drivers of IT cloud services adoption. Three of the top five benefits were about perceived cost advantages of the cloud model: pay for use (#1), payments streamed with use (#3) and shift of IT headcount and costs to the service provider (#5).

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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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As part of our ongoing research into Cloud Computing, IDC recently conducted a survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues about their companies’ use of, and views about, IT Cloud Services. In part 1, we looked at current and future adoption of IT cloud services. In part 2, we looked at users’ views about the key benefits and challenges of IT cloud services.

This post, part 3, identifies the most important attributes users want in their preferred IT cloud services providers. [...read more...]

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As part of our ongoing research into Cloud Computing, IDC recently conducted a survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues about their companies’ use of, and views about, IT Cloud Services. In part 1, we looked at current and future adoption of IT cloud services.

This post, part 2, looks at users’ perceptions of the key benefits and challenges of IT cloud services. [...read more...]

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As part of our ongoing research into Cloud Computing, IDC recently conducted a survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues about their companies’ use of, and views about, IT Cloud Services.

This specific post looks at the current and future adoption of a variety of IT offerings delivered as cloud services. (Subsequent posts will look at users’ perceptions of the key benefits and challenges of IT cloud services, as well as what they want most from suppliers of IT cloud services.) [...read more...]

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At IDC Directions 2008, David Tapper spoke about how Web 2.0 and globalization are profoundly transforming the way companies source (and deliver) IT and other services. Within this broad theme, David explored which technologies companies see as most critical to transform themselves for this emerging world of flexible service delivery and consumption, citing a recent IDC survey of 236 line-of-business (LOB) executives and 268 CIOs and other IT executives. Here’s what he showed:

[CLICK on IMAGE to ENLARGE]

This list of technologies is not an exhaustive one, but it does include some of the major ones I see organizations increasing their investments in today. Here are three of my takeaways from this survey: [...read more...]

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Last week I spoke at IDC’s Middle East CIO Summit in Dubai. We hosted 120 of the top CIOs in the region – from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – for two days of dialogue about their IT leadership priorities and challenges.

As we discussed in IDC Predictions 2008, this is one of the fastest-growing economic regions on the planet – as evidenced by the rising, crane-filled Dubai skyline. The region’s 2007 GDP growth rate of 5% was over two times that of the U.S. and Japan, and over three times that of Western Europe. This economic vitality is fueling rapid IT investment, with IDC projecting over 11% annual growth in IT spending through 2011. [...read more...]

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This morning I’m presenting at IDC Directions 2008 in San Jose on “Enterprise IT in the ‘Post-Disruption’ Era”. Among the research I’m sharing are findings from a recent IDC survey of line of business executives (LOBs) and CIOs about their biggest “wants” for 2008.

Here are two of the slides, the first looking at what LOBs want from their CIOs, the second looking at what CIOs want – in turn – from their IT suppliers: [...read more...]

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For the past two years, innovation has remained the #2 CEO priority (right behind the perennial #1, customer care). And over the past several years, an important new avenue for rapid innovation and value-building has been emerging: community-based collaboration.

A growing number of businesses are enlisting the help, via the Web, of large communities – of customers, prospects, employees and partners – to generate new product and service ideas, solicit feedback on existing offerings, gauge reactions to new marketing messages, etc. On the technology front, an explosion of “Web 2.0″ tools and services are emerging to support this strategic collaboration and communication, including blogs, wikis, really simple syndication (RSS), social networking, social bookmarking, mash-ups, and more. [...read more...]

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