The Titans Are Moving
Dean Nelson
Technology Executive, Board Member, Advisor, Investor, Advocate, Philanthropist.
I believe 2016 is the start of something very different in our industry. It is going to be an epic battle between Amazon, Google and Microsoft in landing companies in their cloud. These big players will continue to one-up each other providing larger, more robust, feature rich cloud services that are a value add to every business on the planet.
We will continue to see announcements like the one yesterday that Apple is leveraging Google's cloud. Does that mean Amazon loses? Not necessarily. It just means that these large cloud providers will have to fight to land and retain customers. My prediction is that customers of all sizes will leverage more than one cloud. It comes down to how much of that pie that each cloud provider will get. That means customer retention is paramount. Today companies have more flexibility than ever when it comes cloud services. They can shift from one to the other based on their business needs. Choosing a cloud is like choosing a carrier for your phone. You can change when you want to. That means the service from each of these cloud providers must truly solve the customer problems. Cloud offerings must be scaleable, stable, secure, cost effective and easy to deploy/use.
To address this demand, the titans are expanding their global portfolio of infrastructure capacity. This takes big investment and time, but the speed and scale of this growth is unprecedented. There is a staggering amount of capacity being added to each portfolio. All three have massive bets in motion all over the globe. The big question is who will win? Ultimately, the customers will. They have more choice and more mature offerings than ever. CIOs are shifting from infrastructure managers to cloud service portfolio managers. This shift means that the cloud providers will also win. Heavy Reading predicted back in 2013 that the mobile cloud market opportunity alone will grow to $1 Trillion by 2017. Based on the growth I am seeing, that prediction is coming true. Bottom line, that is a lot of opportunity to go around. The titans will continuously battle to take the largest piece of the pie, but everyone is going to eat well as long as they prove they deserve a seat at the table.
It is an awesome time to be in this business!
CEO at Chilldyne | Expert in thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and liquid cooling systems
8 年This kind of consolidation generally leads to a worse deal for the consumer, as the market leaders promote regulations & standards that make it harder for smaller companies to compete.
Let the big guys duke it out, while use little guys take our little piece of the pie , already hearing the bigger they grow the more customer service declines
Consultant, Tech Executive, Board Member, Investor, Corporate Advisor
8 年What it also means is that there is no room for anybody else, other than maybe IBM and Oracle. Between them, Amazon, Google and Microsoft captured almost 50% of the market and they are so far ahead in their enormous infrastructure investment that it will be almost impossible for anybody else to join the club.
Executive Managing Director, Data Center Solutions
8 年From a broker perspective we are seeing this flow down at every level of the data center supply chain (because that is what it is becoming). These big cloud companies are simply looking for any power and space that can scale that can get them 20+mw's in months not years. The issue we are seeing is that substations are now hitting their limits and good powered shells have been used up! It has been a very exciting 6 months on our end.
Go to Market Leader @ Amplitude | ex-AWS | ex-DellTechnologies | Startup Advisor | Angel Investor
8 年I would agree, I wonder how the Hybrid / On-Premise cloud offerings are going to have to adapt to this market shift.