A few weeks ago the 4th annual Future of Cloud Computing survey was released. This survey, which is sponsored by North Bridge, in partnership with Gigaom Research and 72 additional partners, is absolutely crammed full of insight and data related to the cloud computing industry. We consider ourselves a VERY small player in this market, but since our business is built in the cloud and our model is 100% SaaS we pay attention to things like this.

A Few Highlights from the Survey

  • From 2011 to 2014, SaaS adoption has more than quintupled from just 11% adoption to 74%
  • The cloud has become integral to 45% of businesses who say that they already, or plan to, run their company from the cloud
  • 49% of this year’s respondents use the cloud to fuel revenue-generating or product-development activities
  • 35% of respondents said “innovation” or “competitive advantage” were their primary reasons for using cloud computing to fuel revenue-generating or product-development activities
  • Across all business apps (except manufacturing), 65-70% of respondents will move some or significant processing to the cloud in the next 12-24 months
  • 52% use the cloud for sales and marketing activities
  • Among both vendors and business users, a hybrid cloud architecture is the most common today and is expected to grow the most over the next five years
  • Two thirds of respondents believe their data will come to reside in some form of cloud over the next two years as bigger data needs consolidation, and collaboration and creation go online.

View The Slides

Closing

The research and findings here are much larger than our traditional focus in higher education. With that said we still think it’s important to know what the big players are doing and where the industry is going. Surveys like this are very important to keeping our pulse on where the puck is heading.

Michael Skok a Venture Capitalist at North Bridge wrote up his thoughts and findings on his personal site and I think those are also worth the read. The ideas of “Everything as a Services” and “Outservicing” are two things that we hope he is right about and strongly believe in and support.