Barb Darrow makes a solid sub-point in her recent article about Rackspace Q1 results, around the growth of the cloud computing market.  “Of perhaps greater concern is that so many vendors are jumping into the cloud services game that there may not be enough customers to support them all. “

So, is the cloud computing marketplace reaching a plateau?  No.  To Barb’s point, it’s the fact that the market only grow so fast, and everyone is positioning their products as “cloud.”  Moreover, hyping that your products are positioned around a popular standard such as OpenStack does not have the effect you’re hoping for if everyone else and their brother is making the same claim.

The fact of the matter is that the market can only grow so fast, and only so many cloud computing projects will start this year, and next year.  Thus, we should dial-back expectations around the growth of technology and provider sales to something that’s a bit more realistic.

The market will keep growing for 5 to 10 years, and at a good pace.  However, if everyone rushes into the market at once, there will be a dip in revenue.  Only so many companies can jump into the cloud computing space and be successful, because the market can only grow so fast.