Huge Clouds Ahead

The big analyst houses are ramping up the noise around cloud computing of late. This week IDC says Cloud Services will generate $42 billion revenue by 2012 which is hot on the heels of Gartner putting Cloud Computing at #2 in its top 10 technologies to watch over the next 3 years.

Gartner cautions not to get caught up in the hype but if you take the top 2 in their list they actually come even more in to focus in the current economic environment. Virtualisation is rightly top of the list and it’s a huge opportunity to drive down costs and drive up efficiency. Cloud Computing is also a good opportunity to move CAPEX to OPEX and have more flexibility in your computing operations. I’m actually surprised we’re not seeing more posts regarding where IT can help drive down costs in the current economic climate. I was asked to shoot a short video for the IOD in Scotland last week and discussed VOIP and flexible working two very real and pragmatic solutions. With my recent US trips, VOIP has been a revelation as much for me as imagine it has for our accounting department who I’m sure used to squeal when they saw my mobile phone bill.

Some food for thought for another post I think…