Cloud Computing Market Trends in 2015

1. Summary

Cloud computing didn’t disappoint expectations in 2014, and it continued to grow in its many forms over the year. Leaders such as Amazon Web Services set a punishing pace, as usual, but it was pursued with increasing conviction by the likes of Microsoft and Google. New entrants brought products to market regularly, and established stalwarts of the enterprise IT market like IBM and HP continued their sometimes-painful process of adaptation. Each of these pieces forms part of a broad and evolving whole, which sometimes becomes obscured by the endless minutiae of deals and acquisitions, profits and losses.

In this report, we identify a small set of overarching trends shaping the cloud-computing market today, and offer a perspective on the ways in which they will shape that market in 2015 and beyond.

Key findings in this report include:

• The adoption of cloud computing remains in a relatively early stage, and customers are keeping their options open.
• Hybrid-cloud implementations dominate the enterprise-cloud landscape today, but hybrid will become less important over the next few years.
• Providers of pure platform-as-a-service solutions are being squeezed out by competing approaches to achieving platform-like capabilities. The rise of containers offers an alternative way to achieve some the same promise offered by PaaS.
• The adoption of cloud continues to threaten established enterprise IT providers as they struggle to adapt. However, ignoring those providers would be unwise at this point.

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