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.

In February, Google made the news somewhat ignominiously when it’s Gmail service was unavailable for several hours, and then again in September. Our own Reid Carlberg’s response to the issue garnered much interest on sites like Reddit and Stumbleupon: “I don’t care.” 

While his subject line was obviously written for effect, his reasoning is absolutely sound:

• Outages of Gmail are extremely rare
• Their support teams often know about a problem before you do
• You don’t need to buy additional maintenance to fix the problem
• Nobody lost any data

We’re pretty sure you’ve heard these themes before from marketing departments espousing the benefits of cloud computing (guilty!), but this is a prime example of why it works so well.

Anyone who has worked in an enterprise email environment managed by Microsoft Exchange, Novell, Lotus or any of the other major players has seen their work email unavailable but at a much higher frequency than Google. The odds of getting information about those outages from your IT was like pulling teeth, because they don’t want egg on their face.

Switching our corporate email to Gmail not only saved us a large amount of money each year, it has provided rock-solid reliability and a level of support that can’t be found anywhere else. Gmail rocks, plain and simple. 

Follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.

Dear IT Leadership,

Today, your business needs you more than ever.  The economy is weakening.  Competition is intense.. You’ve helped it navigate technologies for years.  But the business has immensely complex new challenges today.  It needs your help to operate more efficiently.  It needs your help to innovate in new ways.

In short – they need you to lead – but they need you to lead differently. 

They need you to lead them through radical change. 

What do I mean?

Have the wisdom to divide the marketing hype and the FUD from the real story behind cloud computing and utility computing.  Despite their catchy names, Larry Ellison’s protestations, and the high-energy sales effort you’ll run into, these are real, they’re here to stay and they make a substantial difference.  Your competitors know how to exploit them.  Your business needs to, too.  This is your responsibility.

Have the courage to rely less on the technologies that have served you well so far.  Oracle. Microsoft. SAP.  As painful as it is to admit, they aren’t keeping up.  And they won’t do anything interesting in this department until enough of you, their soon-to-be-former-customers, leave them.  There’s every likelihood they won’t do it then.  And some of your old-line competitors will ignore my plea and do the same: nothing.  This is your opportunity.

Have the strength to pull your team through the keyhole of this new paradigm.  They’ll feel threatened because their old skills aren’t as useful as they once were.  They’ll be scared for their jobs. But they’re closest to the problem and the ones who can best help you take the next step.  Change is hard.  Not everyone will make it.  But you’ll need those who can make the switch for the very real, high value add work of transforming your company.  This is your challenge.

Have the generosity to share what you know about technological success with the newest drivers of technical innovation in your company – business owners.  Cloud computing and utility computing both reduce or eliminate barriers to technology driven innovation, but they don’t eliminate the need for things like validation and requirements gathering.  They help technology become more egalitarian, but  neither cloud computing nor utility computing know your business.  Think disintermediation.  Think empowerment.  Think coaching.  This is your reinvention.

Have the energy to jump in with both feet.  Have the patience to put up with some bumps in the road.  Clouds are built on solid technology and maturing quickly, but they’re still relatively young.  A blip here or there doesn’t mean the sky is falling.  Moreover, your efforts to transform the technical backbone of your enterprise will span multiple generations of cloud and utility computing, including future significant transformation that no one even thinks is possible yet.  This ongoing radical change – this is your chosen profession.

Take the next step. 

Build your next web application on the Salesforce.com Force.com platform.  Start with a free developer account.  Do it in secret and only show someone when it’s done.

Move a server to Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).  Start with the very next small project that someone wants to do but you’re worried is going to cost too much.  Publish the price difference to the rest of the business.

Do a cost comparison between what you’ve spent on Exchange and what your email would cost to run on Google Apps.  Now do that same comparison adding together your total email spend with your total Microsoft Office licensing cost.  Google Apps can replace some of it.  Launch a pilot.

Do it on your own or with help.  Do it because your business demands it.  Do it because you’re scared your competition is out innovating you.  Do it because you’re tired of worrying about backups and whether or a not a server is running.  Do it to grow the value your business delivers without growing headcount.

Whatever the reason, do it.  Do it today.
 

So Dan Galorath has noticed Force.com and started to quantify the savings he believes users can achieve with it.  It looks like Marc Benioff sent the results around to all of SFDC.  With good reason - Galorath estimates 30-40% lower costs when compared to Java.

Very cool.  And consistent with my experience. 

In an explanatory article, How Galorath Quantified the Salesforce.com Platform, there are a couple of interesting nuggets hidden all the way at the bottom:

"For applications that are consistent with the built in capabilities of the SalesForce.com Platform, there appears to be about an 80% reduction in the actual development effort. Because of the ability to create with point-and-click operations to support prototyping, the requirements and design effort is reduced with estimates ranging from 10% to 25%."

You read that right: 80% reduction in development effort.  Wow.

And, since I’m a nitpicker, I’m going to pick on one thing.  Galorath writes:

"APEX does not provide UI services or support external web service calls, the primary focus is to provide data oriented transactional services - more like Stored Procedures in Oracle or SQL Server."

The web services call issue is just incorrect.  APEX absolutely supports those.  And the UI services section — I think this is splitting hairs.  APEX doesn’t, but Visualforce does.

Oh and since I’m really a nitpicker, it’s not "SalesForce.com" with a capital "F".  It’s lower case.  C’mon people.

Glad to see Force.com getting some good formal attention.  Now if we could just get some Z notation animators for it.