I’ve recently returned from this excellent networking and education event. There were some central themes that I took away that I thought would be worth sharing.
First, the bad news. The general economic outlook for the 4th quarter 2011 and beyond is not good, not good at all. In addition, as a subset of the general economy, IT spending is heading in the wrong direction. No need to bore you with a litany of stats and indicators here – it’s just not good. You probably had already figured this out without attending this conference. However, the good news is that despite all this negativity, the forecast for data center expenditures remains strong, perhaps not as strong as 3 months ago, but strong nonetheless.
This is especially true as it pertains to the cloud. In a survey conducted by ChangeWave Research, a division of The 451 Group, the percentage of respondents whose companies currently use applications that run on public cloud computing services has risen steadily from 11% in July, 2010 to 19% in July, 2011. That’s just shy of a doubling in 1 year. While overall IT spending may be decreasing the percentage of the IT budget allocated to the cloud is increasing. Increases can be seen in the usage of SaaS (Software as a Service, e.g., Salesforce.com), PaaS (Platform as a Service, e.g., Google AppEngine), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, e.g., Amazon EC2). For the most part, more cloud means more data center. Yes, the security questions surrounding the cloud do persist but improvements here are ongoing. As one presenter pointed out, we continually make trade-offs. Our cell phones often drop calls and the sound is often garbled but their usage continues to grow by leaps and bounds because it’s sitting in my pocket as I type this and readily available. Similar trade-offs are being made everyday with respect to cloud adoption.
In another presentation we saw that while the gap is narrowing some, data center demand continues to outpace supply. It’s hard to ignore the current economic downturn but there are bright spots where excitement and innovation remain strong.
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Hi Domenic – I found your article on Human Factors / Human error very interesting, especially using the example of the nuclear Submarine.
I have specialised in Human Factors training for 20 years and would be very interested in getting involved with Data Centre training and critical teams awareness programmes.
Please take a minute to have a look at my company website, especially the testimonials page. It would be great to hear back from you to hopefully explore developing some work together that would fit perfectly in the data centre area.
Best regards Phil (Smith)