Rise of the cloud spells gloom for enterprise IT vendors

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Storms lie ahead for HP, IBM, Dell and any other major original equipment maker, due to the rise in cloud computing, three chief technology officers have hinted. In a fireside chat on Tuesday at GigaOm Structure Europe in Amsterdam, Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, was asked how the transition to cloud computing could effect enterprise IT hardware vendors.

"From my point of view I think individual companies will be buying less and less hardware all the time," Vogels said. Along with these issues, Vogels said: "I think there will be less and less datacentres and we will be operating more and more of those." It was not clear whether Vogels meant Amazon or cloud computing companies as a whole when he said this, but either way in my opinion this shift threatens the large OEMs…

Clouds build their own

Along with reduced demand for equipment from smaller companies, these OEMs cannot depend on demand from clouds. Google, Amazon and (it is suspected) Microsoft, build their own customer datacentre server, storage and networking gear. Building your own equipment "represents yet another layer of cost that you can squeeze out if you are doing infrastructure at a massive scale", Lane Patterson, the chief technology officer of Equinix, told me at the GigaOm event…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/rise-of-the-cloud-spells-gloom-for-enterprise-it-vendors-7000005844/