The analyst firm Gartner has made some predictions regarding how IT organizations will shape up in the next few years of this decade. Some of these predictions are about how Cloud Computing will transform IT and I will highlight them here in this post.
One of the most important predictions by Gartner is that 20% of businesses will have absolutely no IT assets (that is one in every 5 businesses). Gartner attributes Cloud Computing as one of the important factors leading to the zero IT asset scenario.
By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.
In fact, this is a bold prediction considering how traditional IT vendors and companies interested in pushing private cloud offerings are dismissing the proliferation of public clouds. This prediction goes on to confirm what many of us are saying already, the cloud computing is not just here to stay but it is going to transform how we do business.
Another interesting prediction from Gartner is related to how Indian outsourcing industry is going to embrace cloud computing
By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings). Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options (also known as cloud services).
This reminds me of a prediction by Mike West of Saugatuck technology at last year’s Gluecon keynote and my apprehension about it.
The day ended with a Keynote by Mike West, an analyst from Saugatuck technology. He gave an overview on where the market is going and the issues that matter. He noted that India Inc. is readying itself to offer IT as a Service in the future. This got me going on my feet and I disputed this notion. My argument was based on the fact that the enterprises are not trusting Cloud providers inside of USA like Amazon.com and there is no way they will trust companies in foreign countries with their IT. Plus, the regulatory issues will definitely prevent such a move. He tried to dismiss my concerns by arguing that his projection was about something down the road and they can use the infrastructure provider in US to take care of these issues. I am still not convinced about it and I would love to have a discussion with him on the topic if an opportunity presents itself.
I still feel that the regulatory issues and the security concerns related to shipping of the control of important data to many different providers (cloud vendors and Indian outsourcing vendors) will make such a large scale adoption difficult. Right now, many of the Indian outsourcing vendors are engaged in cloud washing of their services. Nevertheless, it is important to keep a watch on this segment of the industry.
One interesting thing to note about this deal is that Google is setting initial limits of 1Gb space and 256Mb maximum file size for its storage solution. (Regular users have 1 GB of free storage and can purchase more for $0.25/GB. Enterprise customer pay higher prices, starting at $17/year for 5 GB). Syncplicity users on the other hand can set their own storage size and have no file size limits – an interesting situation then arises when users chose to sync a particular folder onto Google if it contains larger files – in this instance the folder would appear within Syncplicity, and on all the devices that are synced with it, but would not in fact appear within Google. 
As part of my previously 
