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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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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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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In my last post, I wrote about Cisco’s expanding ambitions – to move from a communication products company to a business solutions provider and platform. In this post, I briefly assess Cisco’s potential to get there. [...read more...]

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In Cisco & WebEx: Striking Two Hyperdisruption Chords, we said that Cisco – in the wake of its WebEx acquisition – has a disruption-enabled opportunity to expand its business far beyond networking, moving “up the stack” toward business applications and solutions. Last week, at C-Scape, Cisco’s analyst briefing in San Jose, John Chambers and other Cisco executives articulated just such an expansive vision of the company’s future – one they hope will move the company well beyond its traditional role as networking sector leader, to a leader in providing a wide range of business solutions. [...read more...]

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Earlier this month, IBM’s Systems & Technology Group (STG) hosted its annual briefing for IT industry analysts in Stamford, CT. The briefing covered a lot of ground in 1-1/2 days. But, in my view, the two biggest stories were STG’s plans to: 1) get more proactive with partners around solutions development and delivery, and 2) dramatically increase its SMB market share through new product designs and new delivery models. Here are my key takeaways: [...read more...]

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I recently attended the Fujitsu Forum – Fujitsu’s annual event for customers – in Tokyo, and came away with a much different perspective on the company than I went in with. At the Forum, I saw a company that is striving to develop a much more global market perspective and presence, to become a much more services-led IT supplier, and to leverage the “services-as-software” trend to make its services as asset-based and “industrialized” as possible. All three of these challenging shifts are critical for the company’s growth in today’s “hyper-disrupted” IT marketplace. [...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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