Folia Grace, VP of Product Marketing of SAP Cloud, recently conducted research with analysts and enterprise customers about upcoming trends the cloud. Here’s her conclusion about the top ten trends for 2013. Grace talked with VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall about her research. This is his edited version of her summary.
1. Hybrid cloud growth
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About half of all new enterprise IT spending will be on hybrid cloud by 2016, up from 40 percent this year, according to a survey by Saugatuck. Another 39 percent will be on pure-play cloud, up from 11 percent. This trend toward hybrid isn’t new. But what’s really new is the movement by third-party integrators to do these hybrid cloud integrations for customers. Not everything that people want exists in the cloud. There are concerns around security, and outages. More companies are looking at private clouds as part of their mix.
2. Growth of mobile cloud computing
The first generation of mobile apps didn’t work very well, because they were still formatted for laptops and keyboards. The first enterprise apps suffered from the same limitations. Now we have these wonderful capabilities — gesturing, maps, location — and we’re going to take advantage of that. We’re going to build ubiquitously native beautiful apps for the iPad, for the mobile work force. Usage stats on the growth of mobile devices in the enterprise are eye-opening. Everyone has an iPad. And people are working from different locations. When they are at the coffee shop or at home putting kids to bed, they want something easy to use, so they can manage their life easier.
3. Focus on beautiful applications
This continues from the second trend, or the mobile cloud. We think people want the same sort of flexibility and experience that they get on their iPad — the drag and drop — in their enterprise experience. They want it to be very simple, almost like a consumer experience: fun, engaging and interesting. Enterprise companies are going to want to put their own skin on their apps.
4. Arrival of social in all cloud solutions
Social is not new, and business intelligence is not new. But until now, they’ve been disconnected. If you’re looking at your desktop, maybe you have an RSS feed from everyone at the company talking about the new office. But then you’ve got BI in a separate dashboard. They’re separate. Going forward, we’re starting to infuse social in all of our business processes. Social is a part of the business process. There’s social recruiting, social management, social business intelligence. One of the things we noticed is that when you provide more and more dashboards and analytics reports, you don’t change the behavior of people.
5. Need for the ‘glocal’ cloud
The cloud has been accepted in US. But other countries have more stringent privacy laws, and require companies to keep certain data within their own country. We see that opening up, much more broadly, globally. In Latin America, things are definitely picking up. They have a booming economy, and a tight labor market — and not enough skilled IT people to implement the technology they need. They love the cloud. We see Europe becoming more open to cloud solutions. We call it the “Glocal:” While the global opening is great, certain parts have to be managed at the local level. Managers want to have cost-savings by having best-practice processes in the cloud, while being able to take care of local compliance and reporting requirements. Finance and HR have to be managed at the local level, for example.
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