No doubt the next 4 to 5 years will witness a huge change in the IT scene , with cloud computing being pushed by practically everybody who is anybody ( even those who didn’t think so !!) the scene is set for major shuffle .
Looking at how IT companies are shaping themselves in the current time either through product restructuring, acquisitions or even mergers, I tend to see the whole scene going into a 3 tiered one , in which all those companies will blend into one of those tiers . Here is how I think it will look like :
Here is my take on the roles of each tier in this cloud computing era.
Tier 1: Those are the companies that will be making the most of this era , they will be the face to majority of the customers specially they SME and mid-market business . Companies in this tier are Salesforce.com , Amazon and many others that are in the making or will boom in the next couple of years. This tier will be probably the tier making the most profits .
Tier 2: The management layer is currently picking up rapidly in the market these are companies that will be in charge of hosting, managing and operating the data centre infrastructure either for the Tier 1 companies or for Enterprise customers that will have to maintain private clouds , samples of those companies are Rack Space , Accenture , HCL ,Wipro and many others .
Tier 3 : The supplier layer is where the big “War” is going to happen in the coming years, companies will seek to broaden their product range to provide all what data centers are going to need . Tier 2 companies are the customers for the Tier 3 , in addition to some enterprise customers which are too big to be managed and are on the manage it yourself mode. This is the area where we see the unthinkable happen from my perspective. Even these days we have started hearing some of this “War” happen , rumors Juniper going on sale and EMC being a potential buyer , I would go even further and say that we might see bigger mergers happening ,how about an HP –Cisco Merge ?? or an IBM acquisition of Netapp?? I think this tier will not have room for plenty of players I would say 4 to 5 major players and the rest will get crushed by time.
Surrounding all this will be the service layer of companies , which are basically 2 groups of companies :
Group 1 : Software houses , whether they are giants like SAP , Microsoft or Oracle , or even small unknown ones, they will be more or less neutral to what is happening (although we have Microsoft poking its nose into virtualization with Hyper V) but I tend to think that Microsoft will spin off this Hyper-V business at some point. This groups of companies will buy services/product from all 3 Tiers , and will sell services to all 3 as well .
Group 2 : Consumer hardware companies , those are the likes of Lenovo , the Dell and HP side of consumer electronics , which will remain a must have for the years and years to come even those divisions are not exactly well performing in the current time. One major game changer in this sector is if Apple decides to pull the trigger at some point and launch a business line targeting enterprises and that will be a totally different story.
While I do not want to be seen as if I am doing some crystal ball future telling , it is just my take on how things look to be evolving . The trick about all this is that you get the buzz these days ,But it seems like nobody is willing to take the first move , I think its going to be a snowball effect from there. So who will be first to unleash the race to the final and toughest stretch of the journey to the cloud !!