European industry is very slow to adopting cloud computing compared to their counterparts in US. In my previous posts about the European scene, I have pointed out to the lackluster adoption by the European organizations. I asked them about the European cloud market and what kind of traction they are seeing in the market. Christoph told me that they are finding it difficult to convince customers to move their assets to cloud. He told me that they have to put considerable efforts to educate customers about the benefits of cloud computing. In his opinion, European market is lagging behind US market by at least a year on cloud adoption.
In fact, the first post offered some stats about the adoption from a 451 Group Analyst
The 451 Group’s William Fellows in a “Cloud Outlook 2010” Webcast, says that 57% of spending on cloud computing is done in the U.S., 31% in Europe and 12% in Asia. But when it comes to the adoption of infrastructure as a service, the way to leap the furthest into cloud computing by using Amazon’s EC2 or Rackspace, 93% of that spending is done in the U.S., 6% in Europe and 1% in Asia.
Since then there are indications that the European industry is slowly warming up to the idea of using cloud based services. According to a research conducted by a network solutions vendor, Brocade,
European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualizing assets and accessing applications through the cloud, according to new research*, commissioned by Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD). The research shows that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a distributed – or cloud – computing model within the next two years. Key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).
Since it is a vendor commissioned research, I am not going to give importance to the exact numbers. From my interactions with Cloud practitioners, analysts and vendors in Europe, I could guess that these numbers are bit inflated. However, it does offer some significant insight into how the industry is moving. There is definitely an increased adoption among the enterprises there. As the report points out, there is a stronger interest on private clouds, partly due to the strict privacy laws in European countries and their own worries about security and privacy. I recently covered the news of Scale Up technologies offering Amazon S3 like storage service for German customers from the datacenters in Germany. Their logic behind this offering is that the businesses who are inspired by the enormous cost savings offered by cloud based storage services will want their data to reside within the borders of Germany.
On a related news from Europe that came out last week, leading French telecom operator SFR has partnered with HP to offer cloud based services to their customers. HP and SFR have built a complete cloud services platform designed to enable SFR to offer IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with utility-based pricing to French companies. This is a logical option for European telcos to offer cloud based services from datacenters inside their respective borders and there is a tremendous opportunity out there for them. The HP-SFR partnership is based on the HP offering known as HP Cloud Services Enablement (CSE) portfolio for Communications Service Providers (CSP), which tightly integrates HP software, hardware and services to simplify and speed cloud services deployments.
The next 12 months are going to be interesting for analysts like us who watch both the Europe and Asian markets. There is quite a bit of uptick in cloud adoption happening in these market segments. In Asia, countries like South Korea, Japan, Singapore and India are showing great interest in cloud computing. As the technology matures and security improves, we are going to see higher rate of cloud adoption. If you are a practitioner, analyst or vendor from these markets, I would like to talk to you. Please get in touch with me.
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