IBM gave the cloud-computing industry a big boost last week when it validated the technology by partnering with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. And despite — or even because of — the current economic recession, research firm IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and accounting for nine percent of revenues in five key market segments.
“For organizations eager to delay, reduce or eliminate capital spending, the pay-as-you go cloud computing model is proving to be attractive,” says Joseph Tobolski, the director of cloud computing at Accenture. But as is the case with other earlier technological advances, “Cloud computing brings major challenges as well as big opportunities,” noted Tobolski, who delivered the opening address at Thursday’s IDC Cloud Computing Forum in San Francisco.
Still Immature
Despite being a hot technology topic, cloud computing can be downright nebulous when it comes to precisely defining itself. “As with many popular new technology trends, there are probably as many definitions out there as there are different analysts and vendors,” said Marie Wieck, vice president of middleware services at IBM. “In IBM’s view it’s really a fundamental extension of the Internet computing model, and it is a platform that provides the ability for companies to access services and resources much more quickly.”
Another industry problem is that cloud computing is still in a relatively early stage of development. Gartner believes that it will require several years and many changes in the market before cloud computing becomes a mainstream IT effort. “As cloud computing matures during the next several years, Gartner foresees three distinct, but slightly overlapping, phases of evolution,” said Mark Driver, a vice president at the research firm.
Gartner expects the market phase currently underway — which is being led by the industry’s “pioneers and…