Aneel Lakhani

It’s been a little over a year since I joined Gartner and some things about cloud stick out one anlayst-year in.

1. Cloud consumption is fragmented.

I can find no single pattern or market or threshold function that tips any given organization over into using or building cloud services. If I take the aggregate of all the customers I’ve discussed this with–enterprises, state agencies, federal agencies, cloud service providers–it’s all over the map.

There is no single cloud market. There are dozens. The interesting thing to see is whether vendors arise to serve all of them.

2. There’s a small, growing huge-$$$-potential market for “real”, “true”, “webscale”, whatever-you-want-to-call-it internal-private-not-hosted cloud.

Amazon has left that market to anyone who wants to take it. And that market is being addressed, though relatively quietly (marketing attempts notwithstanding).

3. A class of customer is leading, almost dragging, vendors into the future.

Some aren’t even waiting. They’re running into the future without their vendors and finding new ones there or making it up as they go along.  They’re spinning out companies, products, teams, open-source projects.  This looks new to me, but maybe I just haven’t been around long enough.

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