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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Many people reasonably wonder if the growing interest in cloud computing is a just a short term phenomenon – the latest hype destined to join other fads in the tech market trash bin. As we’ve discussed before, IDC believes that the rapid emergence of cloud services, and the cloud computing model underpinning those services, are ushering in a fundamentally new era of growth and competition in the IT market.

The main reason we believe this is so, is that the cloud computing shift is being driven not just by the emergence of new products and technologies, but by a “perfect storm” of market forces, along three vectors: [...read more...]

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For the past several years, the #1 topic we’ve discussed on this blog is the ongoing shift of business, consumer and IT offerings to the Web – a key element of a broad and profound market transformation IDC has called “hyperdisruption“. So, with all due modesty, the emerging “cloud” model and its growing impact on the market is hardly new news. But 2008 is bringing a big surge in awareness of, and momentum around, this shift to online delivery and consumption; as we predicted, this is being driven by big players – traditional and disruptive alike – finally dropping big cloud-related announcements and offerings on the market.

So when I met last week with Cisco CEO John Chambers, I was particularly interested in his perspectives on the opportunities and threats for Cisco, as the cloud model shifts into a higher gear. [...read more...]

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This morning, my colleagues and I published IDC’s predictions for the 2008 IT marketplace: IDC Predictions 2008 – The “Post-Disruption” Marketplace Takes Shape.

The headlines are two-fold, and closely related to each other: 1) Worldwide IT spending growth will be down by 1 to 1-1/2 points, and 2) IT’s big market makers will stop pussyfooting around, and finally jump into new, disruptive business models and offerings with both feet – to open up the hyper-growth emerging market and SMB segments. [...read more...]

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Many in the market think of Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle as the “kingpins” of the business applications world – after all, these four own the major, traditional application platforms. And they have developed – and are rapidly expanding – large communities of developers around those platforms.

But in my IDC Directions speech in March, I mentioned the growing importance of the major Internet sites like Google, Amazon, Paypal and eBay as a new form of web-based application platform and developer community. [...read more...]

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Two years ago, SAP’s CEO Henning Kagermann told me that he did not foresee any major shift in the company’s large business vs. SMB revenue mix: “We have today a 70%/30% revenue mix. Next year, it might be 68%/32% – that is not a revolution.”

His rationale was that the large enterprise business was such a big focus for SAP – and would continue to account for so much of the business – that any SMB progress would seem marginal, relative to SAP’s overall growth. As it turns out, he was right: in the subsequent two years, the mix didn’t change that much; at this year’s SAPPHIRE, Hans-Peter Klaey, the president of SAP’s new SMB line-of-business, said that today’s SMB share of SAP business is around 30%.

But, as we anticipated last year, things have clearly changed at SAP – in the priority that management is putting on the SMB market, and in terms of what SAP is prepared to do to compete successfully. [...read more...]

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A few weeks ago, I spoke at our annual State of the IT Industry event – IDC Directions – about the remarkable hyperdisruption we see in process in the IT market. A number of clients, among the over 2,000 that attended between the San Jose and Boston venues, have asked for the video of my talk. Here it is (without the “bat-spinning” demo I showed on-site):

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The news is just breaking about Cisco’s $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx (that is some serious change). Cisco’s Chief Development Officer, Charlie Giancarlo, just posted some commentary about the deal.

It’s no secret that Cisco has been maneuvering – especially so in the last year – to move “up the stack”, into applications that take it from its traditional “plumbing” role, into things that matter more explicitly to business users. The company is striving to reinvent itself as a broader ITC (IT and Communications) company, or – even broader – as an “innovation company”, as Charlie put it in his post. In this regard, WebEx will be a nice addition to the portfolio.

Two aspects of this deal grab my attention, as they relate to the “hyperdisruption” megatrends IDC sees driving the future of the market: [...read more...]

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[This is the first of several posts that "call-out" key messages from IDC Predictions 2007 - fg]

As we noted in IDC Predictions 2007, this will be a year of intense “hyperdisruption” in the IT industry, with major structural changes taking place along different industry vectors at once – all interacting with each other and, more important, accelerating each other.

Among the many such disruptions, here are nine that we see as critical for IT suppliers and customers to understand, and factor into their strategies right now: [...read more...]

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2007 will be a year of intense “hyperdisruption” in the IT industry, with major structural changes taking place along different industry vectors at once – all interacting with each other and, more important, accelerating each other. In 2007, we’ll see small business become big, more software become services, more services become software, business IT players become more “consumer-ish”, and consumer players become more business-like. These disruptions, and others, will force most market leaders out of their comfort zones and open up new opportunities to those that choose to surf with these disruptions rather than stand against them. [...read more...]

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