451 Research: Workloads to be Increasingly Cloud-Based Over 2017

By Steve Anderson
Contributing Writer

By 2018—or so goes the latest word from 451 Research (News - Alert)'s “Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation”—businesses are expecting a lot more work to be routed through cloud-based systems. The reports note that, by that 2018 mark, businesses expect 60 percent of workloads to run through cloud-based systems, and that's up from 41 percent of all workloads right now.

Moreover, there will be some particular winners in this growing market. For instance, software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) deployments are set to account for nearly a quarter—23 percent—of all workloads just by the middle of 2018. The notion of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is poised for some of the sector's largest growth rates, doubling over the course of the next two years from 6 percent of enterprise workloads to 12 percent. With several key IaaS adoption drivers working—including application development and Web / media development—it's seen as clear signs of future growth in IaaS afoot. Enterprise workload use is set to grow too, going to 16 percent for data workloads—up from 7 percent—and to 9 percent for business applications, up from 4 percent.

The report's lead author and current research director at 451 Research, Andrew Reichman, commented, “The predicted doubling of IaaS usage is the highest growth expectation for any type of cloud and points to significant revenue potential for vendors in this space. Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allow organizations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex data centers and infrastructure. If used properly, it has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and results of business technology usage.”

With this kind of growth afoot, it's a safe bet that this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy in the end. Why? Because that kind of growth is going to draw competitors, eager to land a slice of a market that's likely to get a lot more slices in its near-term future. Thus, companies will bring out more products designed to get a piece of this market, give customers more choices to select from, and, in the end, create more value. With more customers having more options, more of those customers are likely to act on those options, especially if there's a clear value proposition. Tools like IaaS, SaaS and others have already proven that value, and aren't likely to stop doing so any time soon.

Big gains may be ahead for cloud workload systems, thanks to previous successes and improving product lines. A product line that's already shown value isn't likely to lose ground in the market, unless something truly disastrous happens between here and there.