Cloud Computing: The Hype is Dying and Budgets are Rising

Attensity360 social media dashboard for cloud computing - click to enlarge

Last week David Linthicum of InfoWorld wrote an interesting post, “The cloud computing hype is beginning to die.” He wrote that less information about cloud computing is entering the market and the hype is settling down. Meanwhile, vendors are now focusing on creating new products for the space, and both vendors and IT pros are strategically targeting cloud-based products for specific needs. He based this assessment on his own observations and on an unscientific poll of his cloud computing Twitter buddies.

I also think it is happening along the lines of Dave’s description. Last year we saw an amazing amount of information and alignment around cloud computing: most research firms included cloud computing on their list of strategic client recommendations, and the volume of articles, blog posts, tweets, webinars, conferences, new companies, and new products clearly signaled the arrival of a new model of computing. Now, the volume of information is still great, but I also think it is declining. 

To find out whether the observations of Dave and his Twitter buddies reflect an actual decline in information about cloud computing, I used social media monitoring SaaS product Attensity360 to aggregate and analyze the volume, sentiment, and trend of the topic, “cloud computing.”

Cloud computing topic velocity report - click to enlarge

Attensity360 clearly indicates that mentions of “cloud computing,” are declining in social media. There were 1,153 mentions this month to date, while last month to date there were 2,984 mentions. That’s a 61-percent decline this month. This reduction of “hype” and information is a good thing according to Dave, because it shows that we’ve moved from the “thought leadership” stage to increased understanding and strategic implementation.

A new report from Sand Hill Group, Leaders in the Cloud, supports that IT budgets for cloud computing are increasing as a result of strategic interest and implementation plans. Here is an article about the report inInformationWeek. The study finds that in three years:

• 16% of respondents expect to spend 30% or more of the IT budget on cloud computing
• 8% will spend 21-30% of the budget
• 22% will spend 11-20% of the budget
• 24% will spend 7-10% of the budget
• Those expecting to spend 7% or more make up 80% of the sample

Now that the hype about cloud computing is dying and the focus is increasingly on trying and buying, consider these cloud-based solutions that are easy and quick to deploy, fit well in tight budgets, and will rapidly help you drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Have you noticed an increase in strategic planning for cloud-based implementations at your organization?