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One Day the Cloud Really Will Be Big: The Economist

So how big is the cloud? And how big will it be in, say, ten years?
By Jeremy Geelan
Article Rating:
January 3, 2011 07:30 AM EST
Reads:
 15,700

"One day the cloud really will be big..." concludes an article in this week's international print edition of The Economist, an intriguing article that sets out to quantify the size of the three main layers of the cloud computing ecosystem.

The article draws in part on these statistics , published in Guy Rosen's invaluable "Jack of All Clouds" blog.

What The Economist attempts to do is to quantify the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS layers of the ecosystem. It is in that last category that it makes use of Rosen's data and also quotes Cloudkick - the San Francisco start-up - and Randy Bias, who is, like Rosen, a Top 50 Cloud Blogger.



The article's guesstimate is that "revenues generated by computing infrastructure as a service in 2010 may exceed $1 billion."

It then goes on to speculate about the future:

"So how big is the cloud? And how big will it be in, say, ten years?

It depends on the definition. If you count web-based applications and online platforms, it is already huge and will become huger. Forrester predicts that it will grow to nearly $56 billion by 2020. But raw computing services, the core of the cloud, is much smaller—and will not get much bigger. Forrester, reckons it will be worth $4 billion in 2020 (although this has much to do with the fact that even in the cloud, the cost of computer hardware will continue to drop, points out Stefan Ried of Forrester)."

The Economist doesn't hesitate to gently chastise Amazon for its reticence in terms of supplying statistics regarding EC2.

"Amazon, for instance, only reveals that it now stores more than 200 billion digital 'objects' and has to fulfil nearly 200,000 requests for them per second," the article notes, adding that these are  "impressive ... but not very useful" numbers, since an object can be a small file or an entire movie.

"One day the cloud really will be big," the article concludes, before observing, somewhat trenchantly:

"Given a little more openness, more people might actually believe that."

Published January 3, 2011 – Reads 15,700
Copyright © 2011 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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