New Master Cloud Architecture

 May 9, 2012, All About The Cloud Conference, San Francisco—William McNee from Saugatuck Technology presented the key trends in cloud adoption. The cloud is no longer a passing fad, but an inevitability.

Already there is high awareness within the IT community, and had a high adoption among the trendsetters. The early adopters are looking for big functions to drive their businesses to the next level, and the later adopters are looking for cost savings. Neither will get all of what they are looking for, but both groups will benefit.

Next year, half of all IT departments will have on-premise clouds. By ’14, 63 percent will have hybrid cloud operations. By ’16, a majority of users will be on the cloud, and the cloud will be a hybrid public-private blend. The on-premise portion will drop to about 13 percent of all operations, and three quarters of all investments for IT will be for cloud and hybrid capabilities.

This trend will drive more users to consider prepackaged solutions for their cloud services. The prepackaged solutions will cost less to implement, since everything is already integrated. The value to the user is to mostly eliminate the staffing for integration purposes, a function that currently consumes 60 percent of the IT staff efforts.

The functions that are moving to the cloud include CRM, HR functions, and other generic business SaaS applications. E-commerce and collaborative commerce are low on the list now, but are increasing faster than any other category and will be in the top cloud functions by ’15.

These movements will drive the industry to a new type of multiple platforms covering the areas of cloud, mobile, social, analytics, and integration (CMSA). The integration part is the key to extracting the greatest value from the other functions. This change in IT will trend towards a headcount reduction and a major change in systems.

The architecture will change from client-server to the new boundary-free cluster of functions and will intersect the mobile and internal communications structures. It will also change the roles and functions of the IT groups from systems integration and user support to application and device curator. The changing roles will allow the IT group to innovate, rather than just maintain.

The new model will need different data sources and new ways to look at those data. Analytics will be in all areas of the cloud, but advances in technology are required to address the orders of magnitude increases in data volume and types. The convergence of the multiple functions into the cloud may provide some savings, but the true value will be in driving business performance.