All Signs Point To The Cloud, But Will IBM i Crowd Follow?

Grazed from ITJungle. Author: Alex Woodie.

You don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy.

There’s an abundance of signals reflecting big uptake of clouds, including public clouds run by the aforementioned companies, as well as private clouds run by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM business partners. A January study of more than 1,000 tech pros from RightScale, a provider of cloud management software, shows that private cloud adoption grew from 63 percent of surveyed companies to 77 percent. The survey found that four out of five companies have a hybrid cloud strategy (unchanged from 2015), but that nearly every company (95 percent) is running or at least experimenting with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in the cloud…

The 800-pound gorilla in the space is Amazon Web Services, which was used by 57 percent of the companies in RightScale’s survey. That was flat year-to-year, but Microsoft’s Azure IaaS showed big gains, growing from 12 percent of the surveyed companies to 17 percent. About 10 percent more enterprises (defined as companies with more than 1,000 employees) are at least beginning their cloud journey compared to small and midsized businesses (SMBs), but more SMBs relying heavily on the cloud…

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