Gartner Lays Out 7-year Plan for Cloud Computing

According to Gartner's new report, cloud computing will go through three phases over seven years before it will mature as an industry;

- Phase 1: 2007 to 2011 — Pioneers and Trailblazers - A market development phase when technology providers with the strongest market "vision" will garner the most success among early adopters.

- Phase 2: 2010 to 2013 — Market Consolidation - The market will become overcrowded with a broad range of solutions from large and small vendors, and competitive pressure will drive many weaker players from the market, resulting in acquisition activity. By 2013 this technology will be the preferred, but not the exclusive, choice for the majority of opportunistic and architecturally simple application development efforts among Global 2000 enterprises.

- Phase 3: 2012 to 2015 and Beyond — Mainstream Critical Mass and Commoditization - A small number of large providers will dominate the market, providing de facto standards. These vendors will primarily leverage proprietary technologies developed during the previous five years, but they will also widely support intracloud application programming interfaces to establish a technology "fabric," linking cloud-based solutions across vendor platforms.

This outlook definitely says that cloud computing is here to stay.

AN UPDATE!!

I guess the blogsphere does have some clout! From Lydia Long in her Feb 4th blog.

"Gartner recently put out a press release titled “Gartner Says Cloud Application Infrastructure Technologies Need Seven Years to Mature“, based on a report from my colleague Mark Driver. That’s gotten a bunch of pickup in the press and in the blogosphere. I’ve read a lot of people commenting about how the timeline given seems surprisingly conservative, and I suspect it’s part of what has annoyed Reuven Cohen into posting, “Cloud computing is for everyone — except stupid people.

The confusion, I think, is over what the timeline actually covers.

Cloud computing in general already has substantial business uptake, with potential radical acceleration due to the economic downturn. ... I have far more clients suddenly willing to consider taking even big risks to leap into the cloud, than I have clients who actually have projects well-suited to the public cloud and who will realize substantial immediate cost savings from that move.

On the flip side, for those who have public-facing Web infrastructure, cloud services are now a no-brainer. ...Traditional hosting providers who don’t make the transition near-immediately are going to get eaten alive."