The enterprise cloud adoption survey jointly conducted by Everest Group and Cloud Connect in mid 2012 shows very interesting trends. Unlike other surveys, this effort includes all the cloud market participants such as cloud providers, buyers, third-party advisors, consulting firms, and cloud enablers. This ensures a 360o view of the market.
The survey summary report is now available and can be downloaded here.
The top five messages emerging out of this survey effort are:
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Buyers are willing to transform their infrastructure and business application landscape leveraging cloud models. The growing need for data intensive applications, quicker time to market, flexible infrastructure, and data management is driving this transformation. The survey indicates that over 85% of enterprise buyers have already deployed or plan to deploy cloud-based infrastructure solutions.
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Buyers and providers of cloud services need to find a common ground on understanding challenges in cloud adoption. Though security and integration challenges top the list, the buyers believe that their management is more than willing to deploy cloud solutions whereas providers see lack of management buy-in from the buyers as an important barrier.
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There is a disconnect between what the buyers hold valuable and what the providers believe is important in cloud adoption. Adopters believe that cloud model enables them to improve top line by increasing productivity and reducing the time to market. Moreover, reduction of total cost of ownership does not drive their cloud adoption whereas providers see it as the most important factor.
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Cloud delivery models are significantly impacting the traditional IT buying centers. The survey shows that a considerable portion of IT budget is increasingly getting allocated to the businesses. Moreover, individual business leaders (including C-level executives) have more say in cloud decisions over IT, procurement, or the finance team.
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Overall, the sentiments of buyers of cloud services remain very positive. Most of them met their objective, especially from cloud infrastructure solutions. The survey reveals that ~65% of buyers met their objectives from cloud deployment and ~90% decision makers believe that their cloud adoption will increase in the future.
The survey shows that though currently a large part of cloud adoption is driven by industry-agnostic offering, there is a considerable demand for industry specific solutions. We believe that industry flavors will become prominent once a critical mass of cloud adoption is achieved.
Though the survey showed disconnect between the perspective of buyers and providers in cloud adoption, it also revealed common ground on various aspects. For example, in key decision criteria for cloud evaluation, both the buyers and providers believe that security, contract terms and SLAs, fair pricing, and tenure of the provider are important parameter. We believe these common grounds are good for the industry and development of the cloud market as it aligns the expectations of various market participants and should help in creating relevant cloud services.
Overall the enterprise cloud adoption survey shows that despite all the challenges, confusion, barriers, and other issues, market participants are upbeat about cloud adoption. The buyers are quite satisfied with the outcome of cloud adoption within their enterprise IT set-up. Not only is this positive for the industry, but it also establishes the fact that, unlike other hyped-up trends, cloud delivery models are here to stay.
I will be speaking more about the survey results at Cloud Connect Chicago on September 12. We also have an excellent speaker lineup for the Organizational Readiness track, including thoughts leaders from Cisco, InterContinental Hotels Group, salesforce.com, Morningstar, Fidelity, Neovise and Cloudscaling. Read my blog from earlier this month for a sneak preview of the track sessions. Use code EVERESTGRP to receive 25% off conference passes or claim a free expo pass. I look forward to seeing you at Cloud Connect!
