IDC Sees Costly Battle for Cloud Developers Ahead
December 3, 2013
Grazed from WSJ. Author: Don Clark.
An already fierce battle for primacy among cloud services will shift into a more costly phase next year, IDC predicts. To the victors go the spoils–software developers. The research firm, as a part of a broad annual year-ahead forecast being issued Tuesday, predicts that the big companies jockeying to take over more corporate computing jobs will pony up to expand their computing capacity in 2014.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see them grow their cloud data centers by 20%,” said Frank Gens, an IDC analyst who helped lead the forecasting effort. Amazon.com’s Web services unit has a head start in the field, but players like IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, VMware and Salesforce.com are jostling to catch up. Such services–part of what IDC calls the 3rd Platform market–don’t simply provide generic computing cycles, Gens said. Rather, they have assembled distinct stacks of software to help companies make Web-based applications…
Customers that adopt them can wind up locked into sticking to a particular vendor’s services, he said, just like companies that built applications for particular operating systems did. So the cloud providers have a huge incentive to win the allegiance of software developers, Gens said, in the same way that rival PC and mobile devices camps have battled to become the choice of programmers…
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