My Figure shows a long term forecast for the major elements of enterprise computing between 2005 and 2026. It shows how spending on enterprise hardware has remained on a level while infrastructure software grew in the first decade and cloud exploded, taking away the need to design, plan, budget a build data centers by thousands of medium to large users. Often hidden from discussion is the rapid decline in spending on outsourcing and managed services – a business run by hundreds of thousands of (typically) SMB suppliers who take on parts or all of their customers IT operations in fixed price, inflexible contracts. The decline in this business doesn’t necessarily mean the demise of all of the suppliers, as the smartest ones are in the process of shifting from people-based multi-year contracts to cloud services support.
The net result of these changes are a major shift from branch and distributed computing to a more centralised model, which is being accelerated by better security, resilience and reliability of cloud services and cheaper, faster wide area networking from telecom suppliers. As a new generation of IT managers and admin staff take over from older ones, so I expect a natural move from on to off premise computing. Those enterprise suppliers who talk about hybrid and multi-cloud approaches often miss the point that, although every business will need to keep some of its corporate computing in house, the majority of their spending will shift to offerings from specialist service providers. In future enterprise computing will be outsourced by businesses in the same way that the car park and canteen are.
My seventh prediction is that the movement of computing off premise will accelerate in 2018 and that AWS will overtake Cisco as the largest supplier of enterprise IT.
