The Evolution Of Cloud Computing Markets

July 6th, 2010

Pascal Matzke Vice President, Research Director

Holger Kisker, Ph.D.

Stefan Ried, Ph.D.

With contributors:

Christopher Mines , Thomas Mendel, Ph.D. , John Rymer , Miroslaw Lisserman

Summary

Looking past the current industry hype surrounding all things cloud, Forrester believes that cloud computing is a sustainable, long-term IT paradigm, and the successor to previous mainframe, client/server, and network computing eras. Underpinned by both technology and economic disruptions, the cloud will fundamentally change the way technology providers engage with business customers and individual users. But, at the moment, most customers are suffering from cloud confusion as vendor marketing stretches the term "cloud" across a wide variety of capabilities and, worse, fails to explain the potentials and the limitations of cloud computing in a well-structured way. Forrester's taxonomy of cloud computing markets provides vendors and customers with clear definitions and labels for cloud capabilities. With this taxonomy in hand, vendor strategists can position their offerings in the overall cloud market and better articulate their business value propositions to customers.

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