I am continually frustrated with the way that the IT industry has sometimes embraced cloud computing in a manner that I can only describe as naive and short-sighted. I wrote earlier this year about this, questioning whether CIOs are really considering what the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their cloud investment is as they leap onto the cloud bandwagon at the behest of vendor and media hype.

Well I have been forced to put pen to paper again this week as I question whether enough thought has been put into the future roadmap of all the integration required to pull all their various ad hoc and short term cloud deployments together.

Rust Report: Cloud has come of age, but now it’s time to grow 

It has led me to try and draw a map of what I think the future of the cloud industry looks like and who I think the key cloud players will be. This should help any speculative investment decisions I think because it identifies where the real value is going to come from. I think we have moved out of the first phase of cloud – its childhood if you like – and it will be interesting to see how it matures into a fully grown industry from here. 

Just like any adolescent, this industry could learn the lessons of its past and adapt according to how the world needs it to develop; or it could completely go off the rails, neglect its study and concentrate on the partying! I certainly hope for all our sakes it is the former…but to mix metaphors, I think the forecast will get worse before it gets better.

[Picture Credit: nature.com]