The Microsoft Public Cloud

According to JP Morgan analysts Doug Anmuth, Sterling Auty, Philip Cusick, Rod Hall, and Mark Murphy, the cloud computing movement is “entering a new phase.” Implications are apparently positive for Amazon, though weak for Oracle, SAP, and other traditional IT vendors. Based on a survey of 207 CIOs at organizations with budgets in excess of $600 million per year, a significant insight is that the adoption of the public cloud is likely to increase markedly in the next few years. Say the JP Morgan analysts, “In our view, a near- tripling of the public-Cloud-based workload mix represents a monumental architectural shift, which shows no signs of abating and is likely to create a major ripple effect across the entire technology landscape.”

Microsoft on Top?

In response to the question, “Which IT mega-vendor will be most critical and indispensable to your organization’s IT environment in the future, and why?” Microsoft easily took first place with 47% of the vote. Trailing far behind is Amazon (AWS) with 13%, Cisco with 12%, and Oracle with 11%. But AWS’s arrival in second place has the analysts lauding a “potentially momentous changing of the guard,” and they remark, “CIOs describe AWS as ‘…a transformative power whose impacts will be felt in technology, process, development, etc.’; they state that ‘a lot of IT assets will be migrating to AWS over the next 12 months or so’; they comment on a ‘Paradigm shift – AWS enabled everything to be hosted in the cloud’; and finally, one CIO stated that ‘We are going all in with AWS and will add IoT and machine learning….’”

Public Cloud Thwarting Some Big Vendor Efforts

The shift, however, does not bode well for the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Oracle, Dell, and EMC, the organizations which topped the list of losers. Though worries such as security and data protection still impede public cloud adoption, cloud computing expert David Linthicum states, “I don’t think anything happens overnight — it becomes a systemic evolution… I think more people use cloud than tend to report it… And I think someday, we may perhaps not even call it cloud — it’s just basically computing, the ability to leverage outsourced resources on demand and ultimately finding ways to be more cost-effective.”

Because some organizations haven’t fully embraced the cloud, they are experiencing severe disruptions as consumers shift to public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

By Jennifer Klostermann