EMC: Private/Public Cloud Workload Assumptions to 2020. Saas, BPOS, etc

EMC: Private/Public Cloud to Stabilise: 80/20 by 2015

I went to an EMC event back in January, and of course the topics of discussion were cloud, cloud and uh cloud – after all what’s the biggest driver of storage today? But on the subject of cloud one slide really stuck in my mind. Enough that I am posting on it now. I am a private cloud skeptic – indeed I posted the 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing back in March 2008– so the idea we’ll have settled into a simple Pareto distribution by 2015 seemed kind of crazy. Are we really going to settle into a simple 80/20 for Private/Public cloud within four years or so?

Now EMC made it very clear this was just an “illustrative” example, but its certainly a pointer to how EMC sees the market playing out. I am pretty sure Amazon would have a very different view: maybe 20% private cloud to 80% public by 2020? Actually I would love to know what Amazon’s planning assumptions fotr AWS. One problem is its so hard to measure the cloud market – everything gets labeled private cloud these days – its kind of a placeholder for Enterprise IT.

Anyway – the point of this post is that really I’d like to know what you think. How do you see this stuff shaking out?

OK – lets try again now shall we?

Evidently I spent a couple of weeks obsessing about something I misinterpreted. However I still think the model is interesting- notably for the fact EMC doesn’t expect to see much if any growth in SaaS, as share of overall enterprise workloads, between 2015 and 2020. Why would SaaS stabilise rather the grow after 2015? I mean- I would expect to see a lot of, for example, Microsoft Exchange to head into the cloud. And then there’s more Salesforce, more RightNow, more the list is endless. Of course Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service will continue to grow – and I woiuld expect them to grow faster than EMC expects. All in all I really wanted your thoughts on this. What do you think of EMC’s planning assumptions?

I must stress these models are illustrative.

disclosure: EMC is not a client, but VMware is.