A multitude of acquisitions have taken place at every level of the cloud computing ecosystem recently, including cloud service providers, hardware and software vendors, and systems integrators. And in some cases, these moves have influenced which companies made the ACG Research top cloud service providers list. Consider the following moves by major companies looking to rapidly gain and deliver cloud expertise or consolidate and improve their dominance with their current offerings:
- Verizon acquired Terremark, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider, for $1.4 billion, to provide IT infrastructure services targeting the enterprise market.
- Dell spent more than $2 billion in six months acquiring cloud technologies, including PaaS provider Boomi, and is investing another $1 billion in a group of global data centers.
- IBM acquired Cast Iron, Boomi’s competitor.
- Time Warner Cable acquired NaviSite.
The market has also seen significant strategic alliances, such as the following:
- Microsoft and Toyota forged a strategic partnership to build a global platform for Toyota Telematics Services using Windows Azure.
- CA Technologies and Unisys entered into a joint venture that combines CA’s virtualization and service management products with Unisys’ virtualization and cloud advisory, planning, design and implementation services.
Despite a cautious approach by enterprises in terms of moving major mission-critical applications and their valuable data to the cloud, cloud services are expected to grow rapidly. According to Gartner Research, cloud services could reach $150 billion worldwide by 2014 from about $25 billion this year. Additional projections from In-Stat for the 2010 to 2014 time period are as follows:
- The professional services and healthcare verticals will spend the most on cloud computing services, projected at 120% growth.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) spending will increase 112%.
- PaaS spending will increase 113%.