Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010 - January 5, 2010 at 9:00 am

On the heels of my Top Cloud Computing Stories of 2009 comes (appropriately enough) my Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010. Let’s jump right into it.

1) There Will be Another Outage, and No One Will Panic
In 2009 there were two significant outages of Google’s Gmail service, which rendered it unavailable temporarily. The most interesting part of the story is that the outages are so rare that they were deemed newsworthy by the mainstream media. In 2010 there will likely be an outage of another major Cloud Computing vendor, and the reactions in the media will be the same. It will be covered broadly for 2 reasons:

• Outages are very rare
• Critics and IT luddites are looking for a story to keep the business side off of their backs

Either way, vendors have their best and brightest working to ensure that they don’t happen, and if they do happen they will be short-lived and you won’t even have to think about it. The problem fixes itself.

2) Google Enterprise Applications Will Gain Large Acceptance
In 2009 Google gained significant traction in the market with its Enterprise Apps (Gmail, Docs, Calendar) and in 2010 that trend will only accelerate. Enterprises spend approximately $17b annually on Microsoft Office, and Google’s pricing model combined with its flexibility mean Microsoft could be in trouble. Organizations are always looking for ways to save money, and this is an easy one.

3) Consolidation of Cloud Computing Vendors The big players in cloud computing (Salesforce, Google, Amazon Web Services) have all built good products with basic functionality, and rely on external players to augment them. They focus on what they do best, and outsource the rest.

As many of these augmentations become more mature and become more native to the platforms, look to see the smaller companies to get swallowed up. This creates more value for the big vendors while limiting their exposure to development risk, and increases their internal talent pools.

Combine the business reasons for acquisitions with the ongoing improvements capital markets, and consolidations should make a big comeback this year.

4) "Young" Vendors Will See Explosive Growth
As more parts of the various cloud computing platforms are further opened up for development, expect to see fresh young startups blossoming to fill business requirements. I also fully expect to see our company’s offerings around sales, service, and call centers to grow for these exact reasons.

5) Cloud Computing’s Growth Accelerates
The economic turmoil has been going for over 2 years now, and it appears we are in a new normal. This environment has forced companies to cut costs and run leaner than in previous years. With IT budgets either shrinking or headcount being reduced, it is no longer optional to optimize staff’s time. Organizations do not want to waste resources on maintaining email servers or other on-premise applications when on-demand applications in the cloud make more sense financially.