Lydia Leong

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Lydia Leong
Research VP
11 years at Gartner
19 years IT industry

Lydia Leong is a research vice president in the Technology and Service Providers group at Gartner. Her primary research focus is cloud computing, together with Internet infrastructure services, such as Web hosting, content delivery networks…Read Full Bio

Coverage Areas:

← →

Seven years to SEAP, not to cloud in general

by Lydia Leong  |  February 4, 2009  |  2 Comments

Gartner recently put out a press release titled “Gartner Says Cloud Application Infrastructure Technologies Need Seven Years to Mature“, based on a report from my colleague Mark Driver. That’s gotten a bunch of pickup in the press and in the blogosphere. I’ve read a lot of people commenting about how the timeline given seems surprisingly conservative, and I suspect it’s part of what has annoyed Reuven Cohen into posting, “Cloud computing is for everyone — except stupid people.”

The confusion, I think, is over what the timeline actually covers. Mark is talking specifically about service-enabled application platforms (SEAPs), not cloud computing in general. Basically, a SEAP is a foundation platform for software as a service. Examples of current-generation SEAP platforms are Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, the Facebook application platform, Coghead, and Bungee Labs. (Gartner clients who want to drill into SEAP, see The Impact of SaaS on Application Servers and Platforms.) When you’re talking about SEAP adoption, you’re talking about something pretty complex, on a very different timeframe than the evolution of the broader cloud computing style.

Cloud computing in general already has substantial business uptake, with potential radical acceleration due to the economic downturn. I say “potential” because it’s very clear to me that existing public cloud services, at their current state of maturity, frequently don’t meet the requirements that enterprises are looking for right now. I have far more clients suddenly willing to consider taking even big risks to leap into the cloud, than I have clients who actually have projects well-suited to the public cloud and who will realize substantial immediate cost savings from that move.

On the flip side, for those who have public-facing Web infrastructure, cloud services are now a no-brainer. Expect cloud elasticity and fast provisioning to simply become part of hosting and data center outsourcing solutions. Traditional hosting providers who don’t make the transition near-immediately are going to get eaten alive.

2 Comments »

Category: Infrastructure     Tags: , , ,

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Scott Young   February 4, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    I agree that there are major obstacles to overcome before we will see mainstream adoption of SEAP in medium and large enterprises. These include resolving issues around (1) security of the data, (2) regulatory concerns, and (3) cost to implement within existing infrastructure. The first two require an assessment of risk compared with a perceived financial reward. The third is being addressed by companies like Ensim (shameless plug) which allow you to manage access and user provisioning of cloud-based services in your existing Microsoft-centric infrastructure.

    http://www.ensim.com/products/ensim_unify/google_apps

  • 2 Mike Oliver   July 16, 2009 at 3:37 pm

    In my opinion the SEAP vendors that offer choice vs. Force where the applications that are created on a particular SEAP can be deployed anywhere will win out. The ability to Choose Database, Server OS, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, inside firewall, outside firewall, with AJAX GUI, Flex GUI, SilverLight GUI, Goodle Web Toolkit, the Message Oriented Middleware including JMS, ESB, BizTalk, MessageBroker and the ability to orchestrate not only the applications in a loosely coupled way but the workflow and business processes, well choice vs. Force.

    Ollie