Inquiry Insights: Cloud Computing, Q3 2008

Cloud computing is the latest Silicon Valley trend to hit the circuit. To understand the effect of the latest wave of hype on Forrester clients, we sifted through the more than 20,000 client inquiries we get every year, looking for questions using the phrases "cloud" or "platform-as-a-service (PaaS)" but excluding requests that focused on forms of software-as-a-service (SaaS). The results: "Cloud services" may be all the rage as a blog topic, but it's barely on the radar for enterprise IT clients, who have only logged 14 requests since the beginning of 2008. Vendors and investors are more inquisitive, logging 38 inquiries in the same time period. The primary inquiry topics are: 1) What is cloud computing? 2) How and when should we use cloud offerings? Can we build our own? 3) How big will cloud be and what are the emerging strategies?