Amazon Web Services is the clear cloud winner, sitting on a run rate of $27 billion and continuing to grow at 45 percent (or better). Where AWS’s lead is a bit murkier, however, is in the area of hybrid cloud, that mix of private and public cloud resources that AWS reluctantly embraced, while others raced to promote. Those others, especially Microsoft and IBM (with significant help from Red Hat), have a real shot at owning a bigger share of cloud growth, precisely because of their roots as stodgy and dull enterprise vendors.
There’s no question that enterprises and other organizations are moving to public cloud as quickly as they can. There’s also no question that “as quickly as they can” turns out to be “not very fast” in most instances.
Where CIOs see their IT spend falling—and increasing
According to a recent Credit Suisse survey of 90 enterprise CIOs, spending on IT will decelerate in 2019 from 4.9 percent growth to 4.0 percent growth. This general decline, however, obscures the fact that one area CIOs see growing—and considerably—is cloud computing.
Against this backdrop, it’s interesting to see which vendors CIOs expect to see their spending decline the most:
- IBM: 46 percent
- Oracle: 38 percent
- Dell: 33 percent
- Hewlett-Packard Enterprise: 32 percent
- Cisco Systems: 32 percent
- SAP: 21 percent
- NetApp: 19 percent
- HP: 19 percent
- Microsoft: 17 percent
- IBM’s Red Hat: 14 percent
