Member-only story
Competition is good for customers. The pace of innovation is only accelerating in the age of cloud, open-source, and AI. Why not enjoy these facts as customers of the cloud vendors? The second decade of the cloud is here, and it is time to check what is the best cloud strategy for your company, whether you are an enterprise company, start-up company, Independent Software Vendor (ISV), System Integrator (SI), or any other player in the game-of-clouds.
When I first attended Amazon Web Services Sales Kickoff, more than eight years ago, I remember two graphs on the growing business of AWS. One was the incredible growth path of revenues (almost double year-over-year), services and features (a couple every few weeks), and scale of customers (Netflix, Airbnb, Waze…). Nevertheless, the graph that I remember the most is a pie chart showing the cloud is already but only 1% of the IT market.
I usually hate pie charts for their poor ability to deliver complex numbers and situations; however, in this case, it told the story. It was day 1, and the huge opportunity to improve the life of endless IT people by providing flexibility, agility, reliability, and the many other benefits of the cloud was clear.
Since then, the cloud has grown to 11–12 figures business ($390B in 2020, according to Forbes), and its market share is also much higher. Last week, I attended a conference of SAP, and the speaker on stage said that “we have a cloud-first strategy.” When I hear that sentence from SAP, I know that there is little doubt that all backend end systems and applications will end up soon in the cloud.
However, this is the news of the last decade. Where are we heading from here?
From Hybrid-Cloud to Multi-Cloud
When all your systems are on-premises, after building data centers and buying endless servers and installed them yourself, it is clear that you are thinking about the cloud as a place to expand to, build new systems on, and slowly migrate your existing applications and system when it is time for renewal. The cloud vendors were selling the Hybrid-Cloud concept and offering ways to migrate your VMWare systems or your expensive data warehouse. Many services such as Data Migration Service, Data Sync, Snowball and Snowmobile, Redshift, and EMR…
