2012 is mere hours away. A new business quarter looms, & Irish cloud companies will be gearing up for the traditional January assault on the market. With the last twelve months behind us, & a new year to look forward to, 2012 is the year that will make or break the cloud in Ireland. As such, I've taken a look ahead at what I believe the next 12 months will hold for the cloud computing market.
1. The continued rise & rise of the enterprise app market
With thriving markets for Apple's iOS devices, Android, Google Apps, SalesForce Force.com, & Amazon's App Store already mainstays, 2012 will be the year where AppStores will take off in the enterprise space, providing Cloud services to replace traditionally more expensive pieces of software. This will come from the growing PAAS space, where developers will build out on these platforms. If Google Apps is anything to go by, there will be a big push in this space for enterprise from the big five.
2. PAAS growth
With AppStores taking off, PAAS players will be rubbing their hands gleefully. Long gone are the days of issues over OpenSource VS Microsoft. The real power play is going to be in who provides the better incentives for developers financially. Sure, Google's Android market has more Apps than Apple's, but Apple makes a better payout to developers, & more often. It is also widely acknowledged for having better earning potential for developers. People in the PAAS area turning to the enterprise App market will be aware that having a great App is not enough, enticing people to use your market & make it worth their while will be the key.
3. More mobile & tablet computing
We're starting to see the death of even netbooks with Dell winding their offerings down, & the real focus is on the mobile & tablet computing side of things. With these access points being so focal in the consumer market, it is only natural that adoption in the enterprise area will follow, which will go hand-in-hand with an explosion in the enterprise app market in 2012. The frantic increase in the lawsuits over IP in the tablet/mobile computing space right now across the globe should tell you everything. For the big players, we're at the forefront of the latest technology warfront. Control of the battlefield is essential to how platforms, app stores, developers & the future of the technologies in the enterprise space is at stake.
4. Less Private Cloud discussions
As far as I'm concerned, the debate over private cloud is well & truly over. Private cloud doesn't exist. Call it what it is; virtualised consolidation of private environments. This contentious area of the cloud has been debated ad-infinitim, & has been murked by vendors who were silling these kind of solutions against what are accepted cloud solutions as a means to show a value against what are often cheaper competitive solutions. Private cloud in 2012 will become part of the 'do you remember when' types of discussions, as opposed to constructive parts of discussions about where the cloud goes from 2012.
5. More consumer cloud solutions
Between Google & Amazon's music lockers, iTunes, iCloud, & Microsoft recently announcing they were seeking to bring on more cloud services for their mobile OS users, & Nintendo sneaking an App store under the radar, things are moving at a freight train pace for consumers. Digital Television is finally coming into the fore across Europe, so expect an explosion of cloud-based consumer services for the consumer, including TV-related ones, especially following the US court ruling that TV/movie content uploaded into cloud lockers by consumers is not a violation of copyright law. With Apple rumoured to be releasing a range of televisions in their own unimitable style this year, & With SOPA coming under increasing pressure publically, consumer cloud will continue to be the canary down the mine for Cloud services, which will eventually cross over into the Enterprise.
Showing posts with label iTunes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iTunes. Show all posts
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Episode 8: A guy walks into a bar & orders a beer with his Cloud
I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Go-Oodles at one of the Google offices in Dublin, where I was also introduced to the Chromebook, which is due to hit our shores in July through the guys at Go Oodles. The Chromebook is Google's chosen fighter to enter the ring against Apple's leviathan iPad, which has decimated the competition in the tablet market after initially being scorned by some upon its introduction, & sold like crazy, where you can't even get one in a PC World outlet unless you're there on a Tuesday morning when they get their fresh deliveries of them!
Some have asked why Google are even going down this road considering the spectacular problems facing their Android platform. The issues facing Android are in fact absolutely no fault of Google's, but the poor exposition of Android by handset makers, carriers & what those aforementioned pair have done with their own respective implementations of Android, & also that there's less choice in the way of Apps as a result, as application developers make more money per App from iOS apps than Android ones.
Even in my own experience with my own Android tablet, saw me unable to load a great deal many applications from the official Android Market, because the applications were meant for Android Phones, not tablets. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've actually never used a full unmolested version of Android from Google. Yet I know when I pick up an iOS device; I can have any flavour I want, as long as it's Apple.
But, I'll digress at this point about that as this is not a blog about tablet computing, or Android VS iOS, but how tablet computing is in fact going to lead the march into the cloud, lemming style. While the enterprise is slowly moving into the Cloud, the consumer market is there, front & centre, & the push is persistent, kept simple & enabled by peple like Google, Microsoft, Apple, & Amazon.
Each of these players is involved with some consumer hardware that pushes people with ease into the Cloud & the use of cloud services. I pick up an iPad now, I no longer need a computer to activate it, & I can get straight into the iTunes Cloud to consume as much or as little as I like, & then shove what I want back up into iCloud.
I open up a Chromebook, find a wifi connection, I can work in Google Docs, check my Gmail, & listen to my music up in Amazon's Sound Drive, even watch videos out of YouTube. I can lose my Chromebook, or it break, I can contact Google, or a designated Google partner, & I'm right back there, no data lost, no more 'ah crap, I forgot to back X or Y up!'
Budweiser recently introduced an iPhone app that will track then temperature near where I am & give me cut-price beer in a local bar, or a free drink should it reach a certain temperature. The Cloud is bringing me cheap, or free beer. WOW! If you stood up at a Cloud Computing conference, or talk & made the statement of 'Cloud can even bring free beer to the masses' you would not only be laughed at, but questioned as to whether you yourself perhaps had too much beer.
Within every 'Cloud' company right now there is a drive to push adoption & sales like crazy. Executives are demanding numbers. Sales guys are hitting the market hard & aggressively. In some cases, the numbers are coming up short. Routes to market are being reviewed, messages being tweaked, even the offerings are getting changed, or re-imagined for re-marketing.
The successes in enterprise cloud right now are coming hard & fast in areas of software as a service, like e-mail, officeware or CRM's. These are the real fast quick wins for business consumer and service provider. Large complex migrations are never going to shorten down into exec-friendly boardroom pleasing sales cycles.
People are looking at companies like Google, SalesForce, Marketo, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Apple & wondering why their Cloud offerings are not beating the paths to revenue like these guys are. These guys defined cloud. They were not only born from it, but pretty much defined it respectively. They fulfill the basic needs immediately, don't require much action in terms of market persuasion for people to beat a path to their door, & allow easy, non-fussy consumption of their services.
When you think of them you don't think 'Cloud service'. You don't find yourself asking 'okay, how does their cloud work'. 'How do I benefit from them?' You don't even find yourself really having to do much thinking at all to be on their cloud. And yet each of these guys despite being very active in the enterprise market, is exponentially more active in the average joe's life.
Countless droves of your every-man or every-woman has a G-mail or Hotmail account. Hundreds of millions of us have Apple iPods, or iPhones, or iPads (indications are a huge number have one or more of these devices or even all three!). Alot of us have bought products via Amazon's store, & alot of use SalesForce at our work. And as for Google, a billion unique visits per month across their services says it all.
Amazon are even in the process of introducing their own low-cost tablet computer, which some seem to think will deliberately be sold at or below cost so they can storm into the market & east into Apple's share, & grab those who are still unconvinced by Apple's pricing. This tablet is also believed to also tie neatly into Amazon's AppStore, Cloud Drive & own online store with ease. Further making the push into cloud via consumer devices.
Some have asked why Google are even going down this road considering the spectacular problems facing their Android platform. The issues facing Android are in fact absolutely no fault of Google's, but the poor exposition of Android by handset makers, carriers & what those aforementioned pair have done with their own respective implementations of Android, & also that there's less choice in the way of Apps as a result, as application developers make more money per App from iOS apps than Android ones.
Even in my own experience with my own Android tablet, saw me unable to load a great deal many applications from the official Android Market, because the applications were meant for Android Phones, not tablets. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've actually never used a full unmolested version of Android from Google. Yet I know when I pick up an iOS device; I can have any flavour I want, as long as it's Apple.
But, I'll digress at this point about that as this is not a blog about tablet computing, or Android VS iOS, but how tablet computing is in fact going to lead the march into the cloud, lemming style. While the enterprise is slowly moving into the Cloud, the consumer market is there, front & centre, & the push is persistent, kept simple & enabled by peple like Google, Microsoft, Apple, & Amazon.
Each of these players is involved with some consumer hardware that pushes people with ease into the Cloud & the use of cloud services. I pick up an iPad now, I no longer need a computer to activate it, & I can get straight into the iTunes Cloud to consume as much or as little as I like, & then shove what I want back up into iCloud.
I open up a Chromebook, find a wifi connection, I can work in Google Docs, check my Gmail, & listen to my music up in Amazon's Sound Drive, even watch videos out of YouTube. I can lose my Chromebook, or it break, I can contact Google, or a designated Google partner, & I'm right back there, no data lost, no more 'ah crap, I forgot to back X or Y up!'
Budweiser recently introduced an iPhone app that will track then temperature near where I am & give me cut-price beer in a local bar, or a free drink should it reach a certain temperature. The Cloud is bringing me cheap, or free beer. WOW! If you stood up at a Cloud Computing conference, or talk & made the statement of 'Cloud can even bring free beer to the masses' you would not only be laughed at, but questioned as to whether you yourself perhaps had too much beer.
Within every 'Cloud' company right now there is a drive to push adoption & sales like crazy. Executives are demanding numbers. Sales guys are hitting the market hard & aggressively. In some cases, the numbers are coming up short. Routes to market are being reviewed, messages being tweaked, even the offerings are getting changed, or re-imagined for re-marketing.
The successes in enterprise cloud right now are coming hard & fast in areas of software as a service, like e-mail, officeware or CRM's. These are the real fast quick wins for business consumer and service provider. Large complex migrations are never going to shorten down into exec-friendly boardroom pleasing sales cycles.
People are looking at companies like Google, SalesForce, Marketo, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Apple & wondering why their Cloud offerings are not beating the paths to revenue like these guys are. These guys defined cloud. They were not only born from it, but pretty much defined it respectively. They fulfill the basic needs immediately, don't require much action in terms of market persuasion for people to beat a path to their door, & allow easy, non-fussy consumption of their services.
When you think of them you don't think 'Cloud service'. You don't find yourself asking 'okay, how does their cloud work'. 'How do I benefit from them?' You don't even find yourself really having to do much thinking at all to be on their cloud. And yet each of these guys despite being very active in the enterprise market, is exponentially more active in the average joe's life.
Countless droves of your every-man or every-woman has a G-mail or Hotmail account. Hundreds of millions of us have Apple iPods, or iPhones, or iPads (indications are a huge number have one or more of these devices or even all three!). Alot of us have bought products via Amazon's store, & alot of use SalesForce at our work. And as for Google, a billion unique visits per month across their services says it all.
Amazon are even in the process of introducing their own low-cost tablet computer, which some seem to think will deliberately be sold at or below cost so they can storm into the market & east into Apple's share, & grab those who are still unconvinced by Apple's pricing. This tablet is also believed to also tie neatly into Amazon's AppStore, Cloud Drive & own online store with ease. Further making the push into cloud via consumer devices.
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