Private Clouds Growing at a 50 Percent Clip, IDC Says

Worldwide spending on private cloud services will grow at a 50 percent compound annual growth rate through 2016, at which point it will account for $24 billion in spending, according to the latest forecast from the cloud watchers at IDC. The market for IBM i cloud services is growing, too.

IDC splits the hosted private cloud (HPC) services market into two components. There’s the dedicated private cloud, which offers a dedicated, one-to-one physical compute and storage resources, and the virtual private cloud model, which utilizes shared virtualized resources, and which is an adjunct of the public cloud services model.

IDC researcher Robert Mahowald says virtual HPC will eventually win, and become “the predominant operational model for companies wanting to take advantage of the speed and lower capital costs associated with cloud computing.”

The similarity that virtual HPC has to public cloud services–in particular, public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings–will also help it succeed, IDC says. Organizations will find that they need a way to “centralize the management of all cloud-sourced capabilities,” including platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), and virtual HPC will be that way, IDC says.

“Not even the largest technology incumbents can sustain IT market leadership without achieving leadership in cloud services. Quite simply, vendor failure in cloud services will mean stagnation,” Mahowald says. “Vendors need to be doing everything they can today–to develop a full range of competitive cloud offerings and operating models optimized around those offerings.”

While IDC focuses on evaluating the major HPC and public cloud players like Amazon, IBM SmartCloud, Rackspace, and Savvis, IT Jungle has been tracking the evolution of the cloud in the IBM i space, where there is a mix of private cloud offerings based on the virtual HPC and dedicated HPC models.

Among the vendors offering HPC and public IBM i cloud solutions are: Abacus Solutions, Aegis Technology Services, Connectria Hosting, Datanational, First National Technology Solutions, Logicalis, Mainline Information Systems, mindSHIFT Technologies, NSPI, Premise, Sirius Computer Solutions, Symmetry Corp., Velocity, and Xerox. In addition, more than 100 IBM i ISVs also offer their applications via cloud service.

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