220 Billion Reasons to Consider the Future of Cloud Computing

Grazed from LinkedIn. Author: Michael Skok.

We don’t often see opportunities as clearly as this. Cloud computing is literally reinventing what we know as the computer industry and there’s a $220 billion TAM to be addressed by 2020. I’ve written in the past about Open Source eating the software world. Well the corollary is that Cloud is growing the software industry as Everything becomes available as a cloud Service (Eaase). In fact, according to industry analysts, this opportunity has nearly doubled in size in the last year and we’ve seen that in our own portfolio, which has more than doubled in value to over $2bn+ as of today. And it’s clear to us that it’s still early enough and there are enough drivers and inhibitors that present real opportunity to invest, so long as you read carefully between the clouds.

So as an entrepreneur, where might you invest? To find out, we are now in the third year of running what has now become the industry’s broadest independent survey with 57 vendors, ranging from established players like Amazon, Citrix and Microsoft, to challengers like Rackspace, RedHat and CA. Not to mention important growth players like Acquia, CloudBees, Couchbase, Demandware, Eucalyptus and dozens of others listed below…

So what’s the net on this year’s findings? Three things stand out:

1 – Everyone is looking for competitive advantage from Agility & Scalability, but Business is driving Cloud, by adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) and productivity applications. They are outpacing IT, though IT is investing heavily in the rapidly blending areas of Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IPaaS) to catch up…

Read more from the source @ http://www.linkedin.com/influencers/20130624160201-1893586-220-billion-reasons-to-consider-the-future-of-cloud-computing