IDC: Integrators will win big from cloud in 2011

Integrators have plenty to gain from increased cloud adoption and more stringent performance measuring in 2011, according to IDC senior analyst, Tim Dillon.

The analyst made the comments during IDC’s Cloud for Business Conference in Sydney on Thursday. He claimed cloud adoption would ramp up in the enterprise space throughout the year.

“We’ve seen a shift in mentality around the cloud,” he said. “To get mainstream distribution you’ve got to concentrate on the solutions and the benefits…it will become mainstream.”

But despite the term’s increasing popularity, Dillon predicted the term ‘cloud’ would begin to die this year.

“We won’t use ‘cloud’ as a marketing term by the middle of next year... it’s been done to death and as professional we are over it,” he said. “[Increasing deployment in enterprise] will mean good news for system integrators and bad news for our wallets.

“We’re not going to see an all-in-one approach. It’ll be a phased migration approach to a cloud environment…so the SIs are going to love us for that and their margins will continue to grow.”

Dillon also said security and data sovereignty remained key concerns for customers of any hosted cloud solutions, be it software or infrastructure-as-a-service.

“I don’t think we’re going to have the same laxity on service level agreements [SLAs] that we used to for the cloud,” he added. “They’re going to be much more tightly refined on issues like latency as well as data location.

“This will change the cost-model of the cloud because we currently think of the cloud as cheap. Now we’ll have to start paying a premium.”

While Dillon claimed telcos would continue to make inroads into cloud-based services during 2011, he said they would have to partner with or take over an existing integrator because they lacked the skillsets needed to successfully supply the solution.

“They need channel and integration partners,” he said. “If you look worldwide, the [telcos] that have been successful infrastructure-as-a-service providers have partnered.

“There are a whole lot out there that do not understand nor do they have the capabilities to roll out the cloud.”

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