Infrastructure as a Service – Industry Leaders and Market Growth Trends
Cloud computing had changed the way businesses operate, as the profound change in the delivering of IT services has many implications for the way they are run and how people interact. And I believe that one of the most amazing cloud computing applications is the delivery of infrastructure as a service.
For a business, the need to buy the equipment needed to support operations has disappeared: storage, hardware, servers and networking components, including the big expenses concerning their maintenance and periodic upgrade are now the services providers’ problem, with the client only paying for what and when they need it. Of course, this means that the service provider becomes an extremely important partner, whose professionalism, technical acumen and also ability for innovation are crucial.
There are a few players in the IaaS market who seem to dominate. Amazon Web Services is the largest IaaS provider, offering their services since 2002. Among their clients very well known names like Virgin Atlantic, Sega, Lafarge, Alexa, and even FC Barcelona can be found. The eclectic nature of the companies using their cloud services shows how widespread the model has become.
RackSpace is another major player, with, they say, “more than 100,000 businesses trusting them”. GoGrid is, they say “the world’s largest pure-play Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider specializing in Cloud Infrastructure solutions”. Among the companies using their services are clients like Orange and Harmonix.
These three companies have been offering some type of IaaS products for over a decade, but the market has now become more complex, as big IT companies, and traditional providers of outsourcing services have become involved. Providers like Dell and Fujitsu have joined in, bringing with them significant experience and resources to fight the more established players.
Going forward, it does seem that the IaaS pioneers may still have the advantage. From a PwC survey, „Infrastructure as a Service: New providers innovate to win enterprise cloud business”, it looks like more than half the respondents believe that companies that specialize in private cloud computing management are the best source for managed private cloud services, giving them more trust than to the usual infrastructure outsourcing providers.
I have said before, that for big organizations, private and hybrid clouds are the way forward, and the fight to win this business will be between the cloud pioneers and the big players on the IT&C market, who are investing more and more in cloud capabilities.
Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1388612.
