Cloud computing heralds evolution of biz

After many years of germination, the core ideas at the heart of cloud computing — pay for use, multi-tenancy, external services — appear to be resonating more strongly for more people, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Cloud computing heralds an evolution of business — no less influential than the era of e-business — in positive and negative ways,” said Stephen Prentice, Vice President and Gartner Fellow.

“Overall, there are very real trends toward cloud platforms and also toward massively scalable processing. Virtualisation, service orientation and the internet have converged to sponsor a phenomenon that enables individuals and businesses to choose how they’ll acquire or deliver IT services, with reduced emphasis on the constraints of traditional software and hardware licensing models.”

There continues to be great diversity of activity, maturity and growth among the many different elements of the overall cloud services marketplace. Gartner analysts said they are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises, and an explosion of supply-side activity as technology providers manoeuvre to exploit the growing commercial opportunity.

“The potential benefits of cloud are a shift from ’capacity’ on demand to ‘capability’ on demand, a reduced cost of computing resources and a shift from technology use to ‘value’ consumption,” said Rakesh Kumar, Research Vice President at Gartner.