Cloud third quarter 2014: analysis and outlook

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Taxing the cloud
  3. OpenStack continues to lag
  4. HP buys Eucalyptus, and we can guess why
  5. AWS launches Zocalo
  6. Key takeaways
  7. About David Linthicum

1. Summary

In the third quarter, we saw the continued rise of Docker while any public cloud provider that is not Google, AWS, or Microsoft fought for their lives. AWS launched new services to compete with the likes of Dropbox, there were more signs of struggle from OpenStack, and we saw the long awaited buyout of Eucalyptus by HP. The government figured out ways to tax the cloud, the EPA made a huge cloud blunder, and the private cloud fell even further out of favor.

The cloud computing market seems to be showing signs of maturity…again. A recent Gigaom study showed that most enterprises are on their 3rd or 4th cloud computing projects. Moreover, the instances in production are moving from test beds to true production scale. Enterprises seem to finally grasp the value of cloud and are voting with their dollars.

At the same time, the fallout from the NSA data spying scandal still rages on. Countries such as Russia are putting the fear back into using the cloud by laying down the law about how data is to be stored and leveraged. However, data breaches seem to be largely confined to traditional systems, with public clouds holding up much better than expected.

The third quarter was more about evolution and sustained growth. The hype is clearly falling away, as enterprises look to get the value out of cloud computing and emerging data technology. Some highlights include:

  • Efforts in Vermont presage a wider effort by states to tax cloud computing
  • Open source efforts are struggling. OpenStack adoption is lagging while CloudStack took a bigger hit.
  • HP’s purchase of Eucalyptus is a clear sign that HP wants to remain in the cloud computing game, and AWS is in its sights.
  • AWS launched of Zocalo into the fast-growing managed document storage and sharing service space. While it’s not a bad offering, it does have some work ahead of it before it can catch up to the likes of Dropbox and Box.net.

 

Thumbnail image courtesy: iStock/Thinkstock

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