Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Simon Anderson, CEO, Reliam
Public Cloud Acceleration and a More Acute Focus on Partners
Public cloud adoption is poised to
shift into another gear in the coming year. Many more businesses that have thus
far stayed on the sidelines will get on board, lured both by continual improvements
to cloud infrastructure services and capabilities, and by competitiveness
within their own markets. Amid this increase in adoption, look for businesses to
take advantage of fresh opportunities to increase cloud performance, availability,
and scalability - all while realizing even clearer and more dramatic cost
savings versus their traditional infrastructure.
More specifically, I anticipate these
three changes to the cloud ecosystem in the next year:
1. AWS revenue will grow even faster as a percentage in 2018 than it did
in 2017 (reaching back above 50% again).
In the first quarter of 2017, AWS achieved
a remarkable 43% year-over-year growth. And yet, AWS's revenue growth has
actually been in steady decline since
reaching a stunning 81.5% year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2015. Naturally,
as the marketplace matures it becomes more difficult to put up sky-high
numbers. However, with the ever-increasing ease of entry in moving business
applications to the cloud, the value on the table for organizations choosing to
modernize their infrastructure in this way, and the drive to remain competitive
or to get a leg up on rivals that haven't yet transitioned to the cloud, don't
be surprised to see a renewed acceleration in businesses flocking to AWS.
2. In 2018, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform will invest more
heavily in winning the hearts and minds of channel partners.
The adoption of the public cloud will
continue to broaden to less cloud-savvy mid-market companies and enterprises
that have been laggards in embracing such strategies. Channel partners like
MSPs and consultants are trusted partners of this broad swath of adopters - a
fact that the major cloud providers well understand. These important channel partners
will be seeing pretty substantial efforts by the cloud platforms to win them
over as proponents and capable service providers of their products. Really look
for all three - AWS, Azure, and GCP - to carve out a much more robust and
expansive channel ecosystem throughout 2018.
3. AWS Well-Architected reviews by MSPs and consultants will drive
significant enhancement and optimization of security, performance, and
compliance for applications running on AWS.
During
re:Invent 2017, AWS launched its Well-Architected Partner Program. This enables
authorized AWS partners to utilize a proven set of best practices and
strategies - defined as the AWS Well-Architected framework - in order to review and optimize
customers' critical workloads. In this way, consultants and MSPs have the tools
on hand to improve architecture implementations and address key needs,
resulting in customer applications that feature superior security, performance
and more. The benefits delivered by this nascent program will certainly
increase as it matures into 2018 and beyond.
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About the Author
Simon Anderson is CEO of Reliam, a cloud managed services provider headquartered in Los Angeles. A cloud and Internet infrastructure executive since 2003, he was most recently Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Great Hill Partners, the Boston-based growth capital firm with over $4 billion under management. As CEO of DreamHost from 2011 to 2015, Anderson grew the cloud hosting company to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. He also co-founded Inktank in 2012, which was sold to Red Hat in 2014 for $175 million. Anderson serves on the board of directors of Instaclustr and Aptira. He earned degrees in science and law from the Australian National University.