Cloud hype to last for another 2 to 10 years

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Gartner Research released their updated Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012 and is has some interesting prognostications.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle attempts to measure and predict the amount of time before a particular technology, innovation, or application will reach a “plateau of productivity.” In other words, the way I see it, at what point will it become mainstream achieving adoption by >50% of the market. Here is the quite elaborate graph reduced down to bullets, so even I can understand it.

What will be mainstream in less than 2 years:

Virtualization
Salesforce Automation (SaaS)

This makes sense considering that Gartner also cited penetration and saturation as two key trends for virtualization in 2012 in this blog post. “Penetration and Saturation: Virtualization hitting 50% penetration. Competition and new, small customers driving down prices. The market is growing, but not like it used to, and vendor behavior will change significantly because of it. And don’t forget the impact on server vendors – the next few years will prove to be a challenge until virtualization slows down.”

And, who doesn’t deploy some level of CRM applications today. Based on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for CRM via Forbes, “Gartner estimates 35% of all CRM implementations today use SaaS, growing to over 50% by 2020 according to their projections.”

What will be mainstream in 2 to 5 years
The further down this list, the closer it is to mainstream, or plateau-ing.

Cloud Security & Risk Standards
Community Cloud
Cloud-Optimized Application Design
Private Platform as a Service
Personal Cloud
Cloudbursting
IaaS and Middleware
Big Data
Cloud Management Platforms
Cloud BPM
Cloud Email
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Private Cloud Computing
Application PaaS
Database Platform as a Service (dbPaaS)
Elastic Multi-tenancy
Cloud Computing
Public Cloud Storage
Cloud Web Platforms
Infrastructure as a Service
Enhanced Network Delivery
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Cloud Archiving
Dedicated Email Services

What will be mainstream in 5 to 10 years?

The higher up on this list, the further it is to mainstream, or plateau-ing. In other words, it’s just getting started.

DevOps
MDM Solutions in the Cloud
Hybrid IT
Cloud Services Brokerage
BPaaS
Cloud Application Development Services
Cloud BPM
Browser Client OS
Cloud Collaboration Services
Cloud Parallel Processing
Real-time Infrastructure

Interesting about Gartner’s findings is that Security and Risk Standards are still somewhat out there, and based on one CIO survey to the next, security is still the main obstacle to overcome. At least it’s not in the 5-10 year list. I think once the security question is answered, everything else might move to mainstream at a faster pace. Funny how adoption drives innovation sometimes. Interesting that nothing is in the “more than 10 years” timeframe, and nothing is marked “obsolete”…yet.