Cloud computing has become the principal paradigm for enterprise applications. As businesses modernize their computing and networking architectures, cloud-native architectures are the principal target environments.
As 2019 approaches, it’s clear that the trend toward all-encompassing cloud computing is not slowing down. What follows are my predictions for this vibrant market in the coming year.
SaaS providers will deepen their enterprise application portfolios
It’s clear that Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, and other SaaS providers will not be able to blunt the momentum that Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform have been enjoying in the PaaS and IaaS segments of the public cloud market. To sustain their growth in the face of this trend and prevent the dominant PaaS/IaaS providers from encroaching on their turf, the SaaS providers will double-down their investments in enterprise resource planning, human resources, customer relationship management,and other business applications. In 2019, we will see the SaaS providers roll out a wider range of vertical industry products while deepening the AI-driven digital assistant, embedded recommender, and robotic process automation features of these services to boost user productivity.
Enterprise lift-and-shift of applications, workloads, and data to cloud-native backbones will accelerate
The growing range of commercial hybrid and multicloud tools will speed and reduce the cost of moving enterprise IT assets from on-premises legacy platforms to cloud-native PaaS and IaaS platforms. In 2019, more enterprises will containerize legacy workloads without needing to rewrite existing applications, thereby mitigating the technical risks normally associated with complex migrations. Public cloud providers will put the highest priority on offering migration tools, multicloud backplanes, professional services to help enterprise execute these migrations rapidly, cost-effectively, and with manageable risk.
