No one in my experience can get more information on a slide than Bill, and good information/research it is.

 

McNee singles out 2014 as the marker for a number of key milestones and shifts, making that year somewhat of a watershed for IT adoption, ISV investment and service provider (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) commitments.

 

McNee’s conclusion is that “cloud computing” is coming at enterprise users like a speeding train and they better be prepared to jump on or be tragically left behind.

 

By 2014, McNee says the driver of cloud IT workloads “will be redeployment of on-premise applications, business productivity capabilities and migration of traditional workloads, collaboration infrastructure and general purpose IT infrastructure to public and private clouds.”

 

McNee said in his session that “cloud computing is now the dominant global trend in enterprise IT.” And he backed that up with forecasts that 40% plus of all new enterprise business application/solution decisions will be cloud based by the end of 2014. In addtion, in that year 40% of total IT spend will be cloud based, as will 45%+ of new enterprise workloads and 25%+ of total enterprise workloads.

 

And he noted that major players such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and SAP are investing heavily in the cloud along with cloud-based vendors Google, Salesforce and Amazon. To wit, in his keynote at the same conference, Doug Hauger, Microsoft’s GM for the cloud infrastructure services product management group, said the company has invested more than $2 billion in cloud infrastructure.

 

McNee said ISVs that don’t invest in the cloud trend in the next 3-5 years will be marginalized. He identifies business intelligence, CRM, customer service, collaboration and sales force automation as the leading cloud-based apps that will be deployed over the next two years.

 

But the move to the cloud is not without friction. Issues around workflow, integration, personalization, customization and mobility support will challenge large IT shops at least through 2011, according to McNee. But he adds, overall satisfaction will remain high, keeping users coming back for more.

 

McNee added that PaaS and cloud development will be mainstream in 2014 for building, deploying and running new enterprise applications. And he said in that same year IaaS’s value will be more aligned with private clouds.

 

A copy of McNee’s presentation slides can be found here (search on the page for his name).

 

In addition to attending Bill's session, I also interviewed Ken Wasch, president of the industry association SIIA (which put on the show), and we talked about software, cloud and the future in this short video.