There is no question that cloud computing has been the biggest hit of the last decade – it’s astonishing that there are still major enterprise computing suppliers (HP, Cisco for instance) who are not participating fully by launching their own public IaaS and PaaS services. They seem willing to lose their shirts in order to compete with their service provider customers, the largest of which design and create their own servers and storage systems from components any way. 2018 will see Amazon become the largest enterprise computing supplier on the strength and growth of its AWS business – just think about it Amazon has never been a data center or enterprise vendor at all before it launched its cloud services.
Nevertheless I believe the largest global cloud suppliers (AWS, IBM Softbank, Microsoft Azure, Google, Alibaba) will lose ground to local and regional players such as A1 Telekom (Austria), UKCloud (UK), OVH (France and multiple other countries). As we will see later the growth in cloud services is coming mainly from spending by enterprises on outsourcing and managed services, as users wriggle loose from multi-year inflexible contracts in favour of those which offer some form of ‘pay as you go’ ones. There are tens of thousands of small to medium managed services vendors and channel players across the globe who are biting the bullet and shifting their business models to cloud provision. The net result will be that they compete more strongly with the global leaders, who will continue to open local data centres and SMB services as they expand their businesses.
2018 will be remembered as a year in which the top-down success of global cloud service players was met by the bottom-up success of local ones.
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