Cloud computing ecosystem will arrive in 2013, analysts say

Hamish Barwick| Pcworld

The global cloud computing market will continue to grow in 2013 as enterprises look to reduce costs and boost innovation, according to analyst firm Ovum. In its “2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing” report, Ovum has forecast that public, private, and hybrid cloud models are evolving and becoming enterprise grade. According to Ovum Software UK senior analyst Laurent Lachal, the emergence of cloud computing ecosystems will also take place this year.

“Public clouds are increasingly approached not only as technology delivery platforms but also as ecosystem hubs for cloud service providers and consumers,” he said in a statement.

“These public clouds offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile solution ecosystems of the Internet age.”

Big data

The Ovum report also predicts that data will be the new cloud computing “oil” during 2013. According to Lachal, this is because cloud computing services, and the social or mobile applications that cloud platforms underpin, generate a lot of data which in turn requires cloud services and applications to make sense of it.

“This trend connects with and fuels other industry trends such as the Internet of Things, open government data, consumerization of IT, and, last but not least, big data,” he said.

“The market’s attention under the big data banner, is currently mostly focused on technology issues, but from 2013 onward there will be growing interest in the cultural shift required by vendors and enterprises to turn data into a resource to manage and monetize.”

This management will include data abstraction from underlying IT systems, sharing within and outside the enterprise, and valuation via a model from cloud service providers such as Accenture.

“Some vendors played the cloud data card early, but the cloud data production, brokerage, and consumption ecosystem is still in the making and will continue to evolve over the next five years,” Lachal said.