Cloud-based mobile apps revenues are forecast to hit $9.5 billion by 2014, according to a new report from Juniper Research.
“[Revenues will be…]fuelled by the need for converged, collaborative services, the widespread adoption of mobile broadband services and the deployment of key technological enablers such as HTML5 and the Open Mobile Alliance’s Smart Card Web Server (SCWS),” states the research firm.
Juniper believes that enterprise applications will account for the bulk of mobile cloud app revenues over the next five years. Businesses would adopt Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers to offer scalable data storage solutions allied to device agnostic, synchronized office services, it said.
“However, consumer-oriented apps will comprise an ever-larger proportion of total revenues, derived both from time-based subscriptions to services such as mobile online gaming and advertising from cloud-based social networks,” says Juniper.
The new report warns that enterprises remained wary of entrusting their sensitive data to third parties, and that recent high-profile data would only exacerbate these concerns.
“Not only is it imperative for cloud providers to ensure that access to and storage of customer data is secure, but that the procedures that they put in place in this regard – including data backup strategies – are transparent to the customer,” adds the report’s author Windsor Holden.
Meanwhile, Ovum believes that cloud computing will be the “most important trend for 2010.”
“The next three years will see cloud computing mature rapidly as vendors and enterprises come to grip with the opportunities and challenges that it represents,” states the global research firm. http://about.datamonitor.com/media/releases
Ovum sees cloud computing being deployed on a hybrid basis.
“Enterprises will mix and match public and private cloud elements with traditional hosting and outsourcing services to create solutions that fit short and long-term requirements,” says Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst at Ovum.
But the research firm notes that over the past 18 months, there’s been a “significant shift in focus away from public clouds towards private ones owing to a powerful mix of vendor push and user pull.”
And Lachal believes that adoption will be a two-way street. “It is not just about whether cloud computing is ready for enterprises, it is, more importantly, whether or not enterprises are ready for it,” he says.
According to Ovum, many enterprises are currently not particularly ready for either private or public clouds or any type of hybrids in between. “Besides the current confusion as to what exactly cloud computing is, many enterprises lack the knowledge, skills and metrics to figure out what is best for them,” says Ovum. “They need to be able figure out how to mix and match.”