We know that cloud services and cloud platforms are here to stay and should be considered part of your overall IT portfolio but how much of that portfolio will these services occupy in your future? For most companies – and probably all enterprises – your future won’t be 100% cloud. And your business units and line employees have already ensured that it won’t be 0% cloud. So what’s the right number?

Answering this question isn’t as important as understanding how to prepare your organization for the percentage to be higher than you think it will be – that’s where you should be prioritizing.

On July 9th and 14th, I will be conducting a two-part webinar series for Forrester clients on The Future of Cloud Computing that will help you better understand how this market is moving, how your application portfolio is evolving and what you should be doing about it.

The research behind this webinar series comes primarily from three recent Forrester reports that are recommended reading for those planning their Cloud Playbook. They are:

·      The Public Cloud Market is in Hypergrowth – this report details the rate of cloud services adoption today and our forecast for cloud services between now and 2020. In this report, we discuss the factors affecting cloud service adoption and the patterns of use, which are key to understanding how your company is shifting to the cloud.

·      The Seismic Shift in Application Portfolios – your developers are shifting your portfolio to the cloud primarily to drive greater customer engagement. As such they are hybridizing your portfolio. What does this movement shift to the cloud? And which cloud services and platforms will be most prominent? This report explains the transition taking place and how to best manage this transition.

·      Understand the Cloud Service Provider Landscape – every service provider wants you to believe they are a cloud provider but the reality is a bit different. Many service providers are evolving to deliver cloud value. The real question is what values align best to your needs and when. This report gives you the tools to understand this transition and select the partners who can help you best.

These reports, in culmination, present a clear overview of where the market is going and in doing so present a map you can use to plot your company's journey. Plotting this journey is a critical step in creating a successful cloud investment strategy and will give you the foresight needed to make the right moves now to ensure you are ready to support the business as it evolves to cloud but more importantly get ahead of the business and position yourself as an advisor and evangelist for the right cloud moves. Successful CIOs aren’t waiting idly by to see how the market evolves; they are proactively engaging and leveraging cloud services where they can add value today. They are evolving their IT organizations to be more cloud-forward and are proactively taking steps to optimize their portfolios (both application and infrastructure). And you can too.

In this webinar series you will learn:

·      How best to analyze your application portfolio and make the right cloud moves

·      How to engage the business buyers who are circumventing IT to access cloud services and turn this relationship into a win-win.

·      How to optimize your vendor relationships to ensure you are using the right services and partners to drive the greatest cloud success.

We hope you will join us for this important session that ties together all the disparate points of data and shifting sands of the cloud market into a more cohesive picture of what’s really going on, how quickly it is impacting your organization and what to do about it now. And if after attending this webinar, you want a more directed, custom view of this, tuned to your specific organization, engage our Forrester Consulting team who can help present just such a session.

Non-Forrester clients are also welcome to join us for this important event by purchasing seats at the virtual table. But if you want in, register today, as the room is filling up fast.

My thanks to my fellow Forrester cloud analysts who are crucial to helping us present a full picture of the cloud market which must be viewed from multiple perspectives to be valid. These analysts include: John R. Rymer, Lauren Nelson, Bill Martorelli, Dave Bartoletti, Andy Bartels, John McCarthy, Henry Baltazar and many others.