Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1037
www.iltanet.org 8 Peer to Peer BEST PRACTICES W orldwide cloud computing services revenue is continuing to grow at a rapid rate, with it expected to top $56.3 billion (US) in 2009, according to a report from Gartner. The lion's share of the market will be made up of cloud- based advertising for the next few years. Market revenue grew by 21.3 percent from 2008's $46.4 billion, and it will continue to increase to $150.1 billion in 2013. Sixty percent of cloud computing revenue right now is coming from cloud- based advertising like Google AdWords, and while that percentage will decrease over the next few years, it's still expected to make up 51 percent of total worldwide cloud computing revenue in 2013, said Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner. "We're regarding it as a form of business process, and we decided to call it cloud-based advertising to differentiate it from some of the more traditional business processes that we look at in the report," Pring said. Business processes as cloud services in total accounted for 83 percent of the worldwide revenue in 2008, and it's an area within the cloud computing market that Gartner expects to grow 19.8 percent from 2008 ($38.9 billion) to $46.6 billion 2009. Cloud- based advertising alone accounted for $28 billion of revenue in 2008, and Gartner expects that dollar figure to grow to $33 billion by 2009 (58 percent of the market). While some cloud computing services, such as cloud-based advertising, are already mature as markets, other parts of the market are still relatively unproven, Pring said. Many vendors have created very small, early stage markets like the fledgling platform- as-a-service market that kicked off when Salesforce.com launched Force.com about a year ago. According to Pring, such early stage markets aren't proven and have a long way to go. They're also bringing in negligible revenue, he said. "I don't think they are proven yet, frankly. A lot of these newer ideas have been in the marketplace for less than a year," he said. The hype in the market around cloud computing suggests it's catching on big time, and Gartner's numbers show that it really is starting to ramp up on a large scale. Part of the reason for this growth is the maturing technology that cloud computing runs on. "One is this is all predicated on the Internet, of course, and the Internet has become more central and more robust and more reliable over the last 10 years or so. Software developers are obviously seeing that now as a form of platform in which they can layer their stuff on top of it," Pring said. With new tools and methodologies, it's become easier to develop cloud services and leverage the global transport layer that is the Internet. Additionally, people have become much more comfortable with using the technology and have been looking at things like software-as-a-service as more cost-efficient models. "But now it's being super-charged because cost is on everybody's mind and everybody is under pressure of reducing costs and taking costs out of capital budgets and also operating budgets. That's why there's an explosion of interest at the moment, because people see it as a potentially cheaper option," Pring said. ILTA by Chris Talbot for ConnectIT dated April 5, 2009 www.connectitnews.com Cloud Computing to Top $150 billion by 2013