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CIOs bombarded with hybrid cloud surveys
The battle for enterprise hearts and minds
Two surveys published in recent days that major on CIOs and their attitude to hybrid cloud show the scramble among IT vendors to win enterprise hearts and minds.
A survey of 52 US CIOs conducted for SAP reveals strong support for the notion that hybrid cloud – combining cloud and on-premise applications – reduce complexity and flexibility. But an NTT-sponsored survey of 300 CIOs in Europe shows that the complexity of their own IT architecture is the greatest hurdle to cloud adoption.
In other words, enterprises may need to do a lot of consolidating their hardware and software estates before they are “cloud-ready”. Also institutional barriers are prominent for most (75 per cent) of non-hybrid cloud CIOs, according to SAP, which cites internal resistance and security as primary barriers to adoption.
So the consensus is emerging that hybrid cloud solutions are the way forward for large organizations. But when? Vendors have fixed upon helping the CIO to overcome the obstacles – and for some this will be a matter of survival.
IBM, Oracle, SAP have incumbents’ advantage as they are embedded firmly today in enterprise boardrooms, as indeed are traditional telcos such as Verizon, BT and NTT. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have the firepower and increasingly the product breadth to make a big impact here. But what about the traditional hardware-centric vendors?
A major shift to the cloud will create a mighty headache for many, according to Morgan Stanley which forecasts that Amazon Web Services revenues will leap from $2bn in 2012 to $24bn in 10 years.
Much of this growth will come from the “cannibalization of other traditional IT services, as people flee from expensive, old-style IT into roughly equivalent but cheaper technologies offered by Amazon”, El Reg's Jack Clark wrote. Morgan Stanley points to Brocade, NetApp, QLogogic, EMC and VMware as most vulnerable to an AWS surge. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
