I was able to attend the IDC Directions Conference today and was particularly looking for the "Clouds and Beyond: Positioning for the Next 20 Years in Enterprise IT" session run by Sr. VP and Chief Analyst, Frank Gens. It had a fairly large crown for San Jose in the teeth of a recession.
The talk was positioned as providing info on what one can expect from the cloud and how to take advantage of it. To me the session seemed aimed a the IT person in an enterprise that was still trying to make sense of Cloud computing.
Gens did a good job of providing some high-level industry perspective and spent a fair amount of time reviewing the IDC data. Seeing 2009 as a year where enterprise Cloud activity moves from the sandbox to the mainstream seems a fairly safe prediction.
When I'm at these industry forums I look for the data/information I didn't expect. Gens had three nuggets I came away with that stood out to me. First, there was a slide that outlined the barriers to clouds that their survey respondents listed. After security, which was #1, the next four items (performance, availability, difficulty in integrating with my current operations and not enough customization) seemed to all be pages from the same book. That is, the barrier that respondents were listing were are particulars about using clouds. Not a barrier on *whether* they'd use a cloud.
Second, there was a very interesting slide on what workloads worked better for clouds and which didn't. The information looked very promising and Gens didn't spend much time on it. It looked like early thinking. I wish I'd taken a picture. Finally, IDC seemed to be predicting that about 25% of the increase in market spending from 2009 to 2012 will be on IT that's a Cloud service. That might not sound like a big number, but when you think of the size of the market ($300B+) and even given modes market growth, they're talking a huge number. I was pining for more info on this as well.
All in all a worthwhile time with some good perspective. Thanks IDC and Frank Gens.
