But that's OK - A lot of hype means a lot of awareness. As a vendor this adds wind in our sails and as a customer it makes it easy to find the content that will help make informed decisions. In fact, last I checked, the term 'Cloud Computing' was yielding over 34 million hits on Google. Sounds like lots of information for folks who want to learn more.
Another popular topic about Cloud is how long will it take to become a significant movement. Well, if you believe the leading, trusted analysts in the space like Frank Gens from IDC (I know I do), he already puts the Cloud market -- and let's be specific -- this is the market for External Cloud services (not 'private cloud' spending) at $15.6 billion as of 2009. That's a big Total Addressable Market. Far bigger than many segments of IT as we know it today. And the growth rate is expected to be 27% annually between now and 2014, with some areas such as Cloud Storage racing ahead at a 37% compound annual growth rate.
Let's look at just Cloud Storage. According to those same IDC numbers, it's already 9% of the market, and at the current growth rate, that would make it about $1.8bil this year. That's almost as large as the entire SAN storage networking market, and growing far faster. Projecting forward, by 2014 Cloud Storage spending will exceed $7 bil. And by that time external Cloud spending will account for 10% of the IT budget.
So some are saying Cloud is over-hyped. Some, that it's under-hyped. I'd say it's about right for where it is in its maturity. The perception for some is that Cloud is just for deep file archiving, Test/Dev and limited web-based development. In reality, early adoptors are already running 60-70% of their business apps in the cloud. We're seeing the Government laying the groundwork for serious investments in Cloud-based services through programs such as FedRAMP. And enterprises are swarming shows like VMworld to understand the art-of-the possible, and continue to build upon their internal 'cloud' efforts to be able to extend them towards carrier and service provider clouds.
So long as Cloud vendors continue to deliver capex and opex savings, improved efficiencies, decent quality and security, and fast time-to-solution, then the growth will continue, with or without the hype.
