Published on the 28/01/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Demand for public cloud continues to soar and spending will reach more than AU$5.5 billion in Australia as enterprises grow comfortable with the notion of a third party running their information systems…
Gartner has released its public cloud services forecast for 2016, predicting that Australian spending will rise 17.5 percent this year to AU$5.57 billion compared with AU$4.74 billion a year ago.
It comes as Telstra continues to ramp its investment in cloud services, TechnologyOne unveils its latest cloud platform, Microsoft announces a DIY version of Azure, and SAP reveals that revenue from cloud sales and support services in Asia Pacific and Japan surged 55 percent during the year (cloud subscriptions grew by 99 percent in the region according to the company).
According to Gartner overall demand for cloud in Australia is actually outstripping the international growth rate of 16.5 percent.
Globally, demand for Infrastructure as a Service is tipped to surge 38.5 percent as companies use easily accessible cloud grunt to underpin their digital business strategies, but even the more mature Software as a Service market can expect to enjoy 20.3 percent growth, said the analyst.
The IaaS market is dominated globally by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google (in that order) which now seem to have an unassailable lead. But even the giants can’t afford to rest on their laurels.
The giants continue to lower prices – though the falling Australian dollar compared to the US$ – has masked some of the benefits locally. They also continue to innovate technically.
Microsoft this week announced the long vaunted access to its Azure Stack – a hybrid cloud product that enables organisations to deliver Azure services from their own data centres – or easily shift workloads to Microsoft’s cloud. The company has been working on the approach for some time to offer end users more flexibility about where they run workloads.
The notion is that developers write an application once using the Azure APIs and the resulting software will run either on an in house Azure stack or in the public Azure cloud.
The first technical preview of the technology will be available on 29 January.
