"Single largest opportunity in cloud computing" - Blogging for Computerworld

Ryan Nichols

Last week, I was flattered to help host over 100 leading cloud providers, consumers, and thought leaders for a "Cloud Leadership Summit" in San Francisco. Processing all the interesting ideas from the event will keep me busy for a couple of weeks, but I wanted to get started exploring a concept presented by one of the keynote speakers -- Daryl Plummer, Chief Gartner Fellow. The concept is a cloud service brokerage, which he calls "the single largest revenue growth opportunity in cloud computing, bar none."

The goal of the event was to move beyond "cloud 101" and explore the issues faced by enterprises taking their second, third and fourth step to the public cloud.

"Adoption of the cloud is rising rapidly-- there's no sign that it's going back. We have to think about how will we deal with this." Plummer asked the audience, "How many of you think that in the next five years, you will be using less than 5 cloud services? Less than 50? More than likely, you will be dealing with hundreds of cloud services."

That message resonated with this crowd -- led by CIOs from companies like RehabCare and Brady who are already consuming dozens of cloud services from one or more cloud platforms, and are wresting with cross-cloud identity, security, and data integration.

Read more here....