SaaS, PaaS Adoption Make Big Strides
Results of a new study show that moving communications services into the cloud has become a logical step for most enterprises.
Cloud software and services provider CoreDial has released findings from the fourth annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey, which was conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners, Gigaom Research and supported by more than 70 other collaborating organizations. The survey of more than 1,300 business was revealing.
Fifty-four percent of respondents said they are likely to use cloud-computing resources for their communications over the next two years; the second most likely IT application to have a presence in the cloud after Web presence (63 percent). The top driver for the adoption of cloud computing is the ability for businesses to scale their operations, with 54 percent of respondents listing it as a driver, followed by cost (53 percent) and business agility (52 percent).
Nearly half of those surveyed (49 percent) said they are using the cloud to fuel revenue-generation of new product creation. Forty-five percent said they already, or plan to, run their company from the cloud.
Software-as-a-service is spiking, from 11 percent adoption in 2011 – the first year of the study – to 74 percent this year. In the enterprise, however, it’s mostly the transition of existing applications. The front office is leading the way, with sales and marketing at 51 percent adoption, customer service and analytics both at 43 percent adoption.
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has seen a nearly six-fold increase over the past four years, up to 41 percent adoption.
“ … Over the next 12-24 months there will be an upswing in cloud-communications adoption and the market will continue its rapid growth,” said Alan Rihm, CEO of CoreDial. “There is a long-term opportunity in cloud communications and what we see today is only the beginning of what will be a sustained revenue for service providers.”
So for those companies resistant to the cloud, what’s stopping them? Security continues to be a barrier, with 49 percent of respondents concerned about how secure their data is in the cloud. Interoperability saw a significant decrease, from 27 percent last year, to 17 percent in 2014, with greater attention being paid to issues like data portability; however, fear of vendor lock-in was still 29 percent, which put focus on open-source cloud projects like OpenStack, which have grown. Privacy concerns rose again, to 31 percent, as organizations try to balance the desire for anonymity with the convenience of personalization.
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