Thursday, November 20, 2008

Cloud Services - Business Fundamentals

I thought I'd just separate out some key points I made in my talk last night on cloud services business fundamentals - what are the emerging axioms by which we're going to do business in the cloud in future?

  • Market size: at least 1.3 billion users (and counting)
  • Competition: anyone else in the world who can develop and operate the same software/services as you
  • There will only be room for 1-3 profitable operators in each niche
    • But there will be a lot of niches!
  • Corporate Cloud Services spend will be $42Bn/year by 2012 (IDC, Oct 2008)
    • 0.001% = $42 million annual revenues

  • Rules of engagement:
    • Frictionless sign up / leave model
    • No vendor lock-in possible any more
    • Reputation and trust are everything
  • Customers own their own data
    • They can ask for it back
    • They can control their own privacy settings
    • However, while they "lend" it to you, you can make $$
  • The customer is in charge
    • However, there are plenty of customers to go around!

Presentation from Chch DNUG,19 Nov 2008

I've uploaded my slides from last night's talk at the Christchurch .NET User Group:



(Direct link http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ddtw9mh4_57g4vkgzcc)

Sunday, November 16, 2008

IDC market analysis: IT spend on cloud services to grow to $42 billion / 25% of spend by 2012

More predictions:

"IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion (triple what it is now) by 2012 and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year."

Read the IDC press release and follow the links here.

Also worth noting, the press release includes IDC's definitions of Cloud services vs. Cloud computing:
  • Cloud Services are the consumer and business products, services, and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real time over the Internet. (IDC identifies eight key attributes that more clearly define the new generation of commercial cloud services.)

  • Cloud Computing is an emerging IT development, deployment, and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services, and solutions over the Internet.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Economist Corporate IT Survey: Cloud Computing

Spent much of last week delving into my weekly Economist subscription enjoying the Corporate IT survey on Cloud Computing.

The story covering the market for Enterprise SaaS has the following graph from Gartner (pre- or post global financial meltdown?!?!?!) which speaks volumes:

Monday, November 3, 2008

Slides from Chch .NET code camp cloud services talk

I very much enjoyed giving a talk at the 2008 Christchurch .NET Code Camp on Saturday, although some in the audience may have noticed that I hadn't timed the slides beforehand! (ended up squashing half the talk into the last 5 minutes - oops). Anyway, the event was excellently organised by Matt Smith, Andy (Scrasé ☺), Chris Fairbairn and the rest of the team - thanks I really enjoyed the event. Unfortunately I had to run off immediately and look after 10 six year olds at my daughter's birthday party - but I'm still alive! ;-)

I've attached the slides here in PDF format - please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of the topics I discussed.