A quick update on Cloud Computing…

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Came across this article in Reuters stating that in a survery conducted with leading CIO’s in both Europe and the US by UBS, they expect to spend 2% less on their IT systems. However, in contradiction to my article yesterday, it goes on to state that based on their findings, there will be a slowdown in the sales of virtualisation software by roughly 6%, down from a 10% growth in 2008.

I found this quite surprising. The survey by UBS concluded that “This may suggest that while virtualisation is a trend that is no doubt here to stay, it still does not have the collective mindshare as many might think.”

There can be many reasons why leading CIO’s may not see virtualisation as a prominent sector in 2009. However, if we look at the report in a bit more detail, there are clues as to why these opinions exist. The report did not ‘expose’ the CIO’s who took part in the survey. However, revenues of companies involved in the survey “ranged from $2 billion to more than $10 billion annually and they represented industries ranging from communications to healthcare to utilities”.

Personally, I agree with GigaOm, who also suggest that virtualisation will be something that will be extremely popular among SME’s’ and smaller corporate entities, as they will see more benefit in moving to a more centralised method of computing. As sighted yesterday, there are still many privacy and security issues to be tackled for virtualsiation to be seen as a defacto method of choice among large conglomerates, and it may be due to this that they are still timid about getting on board.

Related articles

• Europe and US to cut IT spend in 2009
• Cloud Computing and the Enterprise
• UBS says IT spending in Europe, US to drop 2 per cent in 2009