As the year winds to a close, the Gigaom Research curators set their sights on 2014, and share thoughts on what to expect, what not to. Will the NSA revelations have any long-term effect on U.S. cloud computing or have we simply moved on? Are wearables really worth their hype? And when it comes to social business, how fast is too fast in terms of when it comes to changing the nature of the way we work?

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The energetic atmosphere at the venue resembled Microsoft developer shows during the ’ 90s, which witnessed the launch of Windows and .NET. The expo was so jammed that it was tough to get down the aisles. The frenzy and excitement seen at the partner booths and the overall participation of the ecosystem indicates the growing influence of AWS on the industry. Increasingly AWS looks like the new Microsoft, with its cloud platform becoming the new Windows.

Amazon didn’t miss an opportunity to tell the world that it has gone beyond startups to become the cloud of choice for enterprises. AWS executives dropped the logos of GE, Shell, Samsung, Dow Jones, Tokyo Stock Exchange, Unilever, and Nasdaq liberally, making the statement that enterprises are on its cloud. It now employs thousands of field sales representatives across the globe and has invested in professional services focused squarely on enterprise customer adoption.

The company made it clear, however, that it has no intention of building a large enterprise sales force. It’s developing a more technical, instantly credible sales team that doesn’t need a sales engineer on every call to get a question answered. “We’re not spending time on the golf course,” said Andy Jassy, the SVP at Amazon, taking a shot at the bloated, ponderous legacy IT vendors. “We’re pretty adamant we represent something different,” he said.

The event also saw a huge increase in the focus on partners and ecosystem. The Amazon Partner Network (APN) program now classifies partners into categories like security and the public sector. The new competencies related to SAP and Oracle endorse the capabilities of qualified partners to deliver niche solutions. Two new certifications related to administration and development on AWS were launched at re:Invent.

More than anything, it was clear that AWS re:Invent has become the biggest occasion to release new products and features at Amazon Web Services. Last year it was just the Redshift announcement that made a splash at the event. This year’s event was used to announce over half a dozen new features and services.

Amazon widened the gap with its competition by moving up the stack. It has ventured into niche, new areas that will take considerable time for the competition to catch up.

Feature image courtesy Flickr user MowT

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Continued concern stemming from the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance scandal pushed many cloud providers to offer new privacy services, including data encryption by default.

OpenStack turned three years old, which has prompted many to assess the viability of its popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud standard. Still, OpenStack drives solid support from those who sell its private and public clouds, including Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace. Overall, the standard seems solid, and it offers an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Nevertheless, OpenStack’s growth has been lackluster compared to AWS.

Finally, there seems to be more interest in multicloud implementations, which go beyond hybrid cloud offerings. A multicloud mixes and matches many types of private and public clouds, knitting them together to form the right platform for a specific enterprise. Arising from its use is the need for management and governance, which has led to the birth new governance systems, called cloud management platforms (CMP). More attention is being paid to this category of technology, which is a combination of existing governance approaches melded with cloud management that focuses on operations and devops.

In summary, events in the third quarter included:

• Multicloud rose as a concept, with a clamor for cloud governance, including the use of CMP.
• Changes at Microsoft called into question the viability of the software giant’s cloud strategy.
• The OpenStack cloud standard turned three years old with momentum, but concerns still exist.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigated IBM for cloud washing as AWS and IBM battled for the CIA cloud contract.
• Several major cloud players were awarded $10 billion worth of new contracts.
• Oracle boosted its in-memory capabilities and price tag, while its hardware revenues continued to tumble.

Source: flickr user dennis_vu

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This report looks at the June survey of 302 IT decision makers at companies with over 500 employees. We partnered with venture capital firm North Bridge to examine cloud adoption trends across a broader spectrum of cloud users. Those results are found here.

This snapshot report compares senior managers’ (C-level and VP-level) answers to questions about cloud adoption to those from their direct reports (IT managers and directors). The purpose is to examine any disconnect between the two groups. With some understanding of the different viewpoints, IT organizations should have a smoother migration to the cloud.

Senior IT leaders have to watch for sticking points in moving their cloud efforts forward:

• IT operations managers fear that a migration to cloud threatens their jobs. Reassure them that a 100 percent shift won’t happen, and that any shift that occurs will be gradual. IT ops should morph into a role managing the complexity that comes with a move to the cloud by matching the requirements of your business and your customers to the services offered by your cloud providers.
• IT managers are less concerned with the finances of IT (e.g., TCO and capex to opex) than they should be. Less than a quarter of those surveyed thought that TCO would improve with a move to the cloud. IT leaders will need to invest in analytics and modeling to help IT managers make the most cost-effective use of cloud resources.

Tech vendors and service providers should take note of the following:

• The C suite cares deeply about anything to do with the economics of cloud (TCO, capex versus opex, etc.). Almost half (49 percent) of IT leaders expect better TCO from adopting cloud services.
• Other hot buttons for IT leaders are complexity, interoperability, lock-in, and the growth of cloud APIs.

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This quarter we saw more signs of maturity in the cloud computing market, including a new version of the OpenStack standard, more consolidation of cloud computing companies, and a scandal that dominated the national news and could make some of us afraid of cloud computing. Indeed, those in IT are becoming a bit more wary of the hype surrounding cloud computing as they look to separate what’s popular to say in meetings versus what’s actually able to solve business problems.

Of course, there is always some excitement to be found in any emerging market. This quarter the excitement was around the NSA leaks that revealed that some phone records and some social media information are under surveillance by the U.S. government. This leads many to conclude that information stored on cloud-based platforms has been and still is vulnerable to spying by the government. This sent chills down the spines of many who have already made the migration to the cloud and provided new excuses for those who have not.

Events during this quarter included:

• The release of new information from Berkeley Labs supports the assertion that cloud computing is truly energy-efficient.

• Big acquisitions drove more consolidation as well as some concerns from those who placed bets on those being acquired.

• The NSA scandal calls cloud privacy into question.

• The release of OpenStack Grizzly boosts traction for this already popular standard.

• Movers and shakers in big data were Tom Reilly at Cloudera, Sydney Carey at 10gen, and Raymie Stata at Altiscale.

• Tableau’s IPO and new big data VC funds show growth and interest in enterprise software.

Source: flickr user Ricardo Liberato

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This report focuses in particular on OpenStack as an underlying cloud platform to support this new type of organization. In addition, it examines a handful of ecommerce and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and the challenges these companies seek to solve by adopting a more agile software development and deployment process using OpenStack.

Key issues this report addresses are:

• Defining the continuous delivery (CD) approach
• Deploying the cloud as the CD infrastructure: public to private
• Choosing OpenStack as an infrastructure platform on which to build a private cloud
• Addressing the benefits and disadvantages of the OpenStack community
• Moving toward a continuous delivery model to reap the full benefits of a cloud platform
• Defining the role of devops

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• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now valued at about $20 billion in total value.

• OpenStack made headlines by garnering renewed interest from IBM. Oracle, meanwhile, went after existing OpenStack upstart Nimbula.

• Consumer-oriented clouds continued to grow. These clouds are typically leveraged for device-to-device synchronization, such as iCloud and Dropbox.

• A Strategy Analytics study shows that cloud models are quickly overtaking traditional computing models, such as mobile device usage overtaking the use of the PC.

The trends seen in the first quarter reflect a movement toward stability. The hype around cloud computing was scary for most enterprises in the past; however, now the cloud is continuing to solve real problems and is working within real budgets. As the economy continues its recovery, investment in cloud-based systems will continue, both for the use of cloud-based technologies and the creation of new services from existing providers or new upstart providers.

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Cloud computing is moving from its hyped and honeymoon period to the reality that it’s a complex distributed system that will require some sound thinking within enterprise IT. We are getting to the “doing” part of the process, and money is actually flowing to cloud computing providers as growth continues.

Finally, while the enterprise focused largely on private clouds, interest in public cloud computing is greater than many analysts expected. This is due largely to the ease of deployment and lower costs of the public cloud and the ability to hide this from the enterprise-IT overlords.

Key highlights from the quarter include:

• A new focus on cloud-based databases, including the release of new database offerings from AWS
• The continued rise of OpenStack, including the support of a few key cloud computing players
• Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. 2012 presidential election as examples of where we might use predictive analytics to better predict outcomes
• The Pivotal Initiative, a new company from EMC and VMware that will focus on big data opportunities in the cloud

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The usual suspects, Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remains the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter.

Key highlights from the quarter include:

The flash-storage market explodes with VC investments, IPO prospects, and M&A

VMware survives an executive shakeup at the top, repeals the VRAM tax, and acquires DynamicOps and Nicira

Allan Leinwand of Zynga and Byron Sebastian of Heroku take off for greener pastures Cloud costing and forecasting tools hit prime time
Hadoop gets interactive and real time

This quarterly wrap-up discusses these milestones and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies, and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months.

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