Cloud market moving to higher value services rather than commodity pricing

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Customers that view cloud computing as a way of cutting costs by reducing IT provisioning to commodity services may be getting the wrong end of the stick, as the market is increasingly turning to value-added services that are a better fit for customer requirements. The latest Cloud Price Index report from analyst 451 Research claims to show that, rather than being dominated by cut-throat commodity pricing, the cloud market sees customers increasingly looking for value-added services, and providers are moving up the stack to meet this demand and maintain profits.

"Despite all the noise about cloud becoming a commodity, our research demonstrates a very limited relationship between price and market share. Certainly, being cheap doesn’t guarantee more revenue, and being expensive doesn’t guarantee less," said Dr Owen Rogers, research director of 451 Research’s Digital Economics Unit…

The report claims that virtual machine instance prices have dropped 12 per cent on average over the past 18 months, while the price of storage, NoSQL, load balancing and other enterprise-grade cloud services has remained stable during the same period and continues to provide margins for the cloud operators providing them…

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