Gartner: Cloud Computing braucht sieben Jahre bis zur vollen Marktreife

As a result of a focus on technical merit over investment protection, technology providers with the strongest market "vision" will garner the most success among early adopters. Building on this trend, many early SEAP vendors will focus on rapid-application-development-oriented tools and deployment features, making their solutions particularly attractive among end-user computing efforts and social-computing projects.

Phase 2: 2010 to 2013 — Market Consolidation

Gartner predicts that by 2012, the SEAP market will become overcrowded with a broad range of solutions from large and small vendors, and competitive pressure will drive many weaker players from the market, resulting in acquisition activity. During this consolidation phase, SEAP infrastructure will become increasingly attractive to a broader range of potential adopters, resulting in a more mainstream and conservative user base. Consequently, the "ability to execute" will become equally as important as technical innovation and market vision among most mainstream adopters. Return-on-investment time frames will be extended from tactical short-term opportunities to longer, strategic time frames of three to five years.

By 2013, Gartner expects SEAP technology to be the preferred, but not the exclusive, choice for the majority of opportunistic and architecturally simple application development efforts among Global 2000 enterprises, and as a result, some will seek to expand their reliance on SEAP platforms to include longer-term strategic (systematic) investments.

Phase 3: 2012 to 2015 and Beyond — Mainstream Critical Mass and Commoditisation

In 2013, a small number of large SEAP providers will dominate the market, providing de facto standards. These vendors will primarily leverage proprietary technologies developed during the previous five years, but they will also widely support intracloud application programming interfaces to establish a SEAP technology "fabric," linking cloud-based solutions across vendor platforms.

Market expansion into increasingly conservative user bases will further shift market emphasis from innovation to stability, cost and investment protection. Competition between proprietary lock-in and open-SEAP technologies will increase and, by 2014, concern over lock-in will lead to critical-mass support for one or more open-source SEAP software stacks. These open-SEAP stacks will begin to compete with proprietary solutions and slowly growing portions of the SEAP market beyond the 2015 time frame.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Cloud Application Infrastructure Technology Needs Seven Years to Mature." The report is on Gartner's Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=835742&subref=simplesearch.