Market Research Media

A new report by Market Research Media “U.S. Federal Cloud Computing Market Forecast 2010-2015” suggested that the cloud computing technologies are expected to drive most revenue growth opportunities for government IT contractors over the next six years. The federal government has fully embraced concept of Software as a Service seeking out to reduce IT operating expenses while improving agencies’ productivity. Vivek Kundra, the country’s chief information officer, is an active proponent of the idea of using commercial cloud computing solutions in the government IT infrastructure. The adoption of cloud computing within the public sector can’t be considered without looking at the developments in private sector. Here’s the good, the bad, the ugly of the private sector cloud computing news.

Good News

• Big names reach for a piece of the cloud computing pie. Microsoft prepares to roll out its services-based cloud platform Azure in the end of 2009. IBM launches a suite of corporate solutions as services – a pre-integrated blade server center called Cloud Burst and virtual desktop as a service. HP teams with other companies to offer cloud services to large and middle enterprises and SMBs.
• Systems integrators like Unisys, Computer Sciences Corp. and Verizon Business are introducing Infrastructure as a Service offerings.
• Virtualization giant VMware has launched a new product vSphere 4 positioned as the first cloud computing operating system combining under one roof a diverse set of dynamic virtualization management tools.
• Google and Salesforce are aggressively targeting the enterprise market with application-building tools.
• Amazon Web Services introduced a pack of entire new features addressing usability issues.
• Cisco made the big splash with the WebEx Collaboration Cloud announcement, taking a key step towards positioning WebEx as an industry-wide SaaS platform.

Bad News

• McKinsey & Co. put doubts on cost efficiency of cloud computing in its April report “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing”. The report suggests that cloud computing is beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses but questions the cloud computing model sustainability for large corporations.

Ugly News
Cloud computing prospectives marred by outages and security concerns:

• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks inflicted serious damage on UltraDNS and cloud provider
  GoGrid.
• Power knock out due to a lightning strike crippled Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure for hours.
• Outages at Rackspace and Google caused swathes of customer applications to go down.

Whether or not the wrap-up of the cloud computing market presented in the article is perceived to biased or not, the concept of cloud computing is here to stay, with all of the major IT vendors competing competing for a piece of the cloud computing pie.