Five Steps to Becoming a Cloud-Ready Company
Organizations have spent the past two years growing their cloud services portfolio, and now they’re ready to start the integration work, according to a report by independent research firm Technology Business Research (TBR).
Of course, it’s not exactly a secret that the cloud integration market is thriving right now; for almost every quarter over the past year, an integration vendor has issued a press release attributing cloud work to their growth.
Still, it’s a bit startling to see some of the numbers coming out of the report, which surveyed 650 cloud end users in North America, Europe and Asia about “hybrid cloud” adoption. TBR defines hybrid cloud as “cloud-to-cloud integration across a single workload and between two workloads that can be split into three sections: Private-private, private-public and public-public.”
 Here are some of the key figures:
- 31 percent growth—the portion the hybrid cloud market is expected to experience over the next year
- $7 billion—the amount the market will be worth by the end of this year
- 49 percent—the portion of the integration work that will be in private-public integration
- 27 percent—the portion of growth that will be private-private
- 24 percent—the portion of integration work that will be public-public
A related TBR report released this week surveyed 900 end users across the same continents’ cloud professional service and found more than 74 percent of enterprise customers plan to hire a service provider for help with implementation and systems integration. Revenue for cloud professional services is expected to grow at a compound rate of 12 percent, reaching $30 billion in four years.
The results tell us a couple of things about cloud adoption, TBR senior analyst Ramunas Svarcas told Network World. First, it’s complex — much more so than the whole “you just need a credit card and an Internet connection” adage suggests. Also, a skill gap exists between cloud computing knowledge and implementation. While that news won’t shock anyone, it’s good to see some data behind it.
The study also asked which consultancies end user companies have hired and found IBM ranked as the top choice for professional services at large enterprises. HP, Dell and Fujitsu also showed up along with more traditional service companies such as Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini, Network World reports.
