Forrester Revisits Cloud Predictions, Finds Itself a Bit Wanting

Forrester Research (News - Alert) is one of the livelier analyst outfits. It is also not afraid to criticize itself. Case in point, the company just issued itself a report card on last year’s cloud predictions, of which there were ten.

The company’s first item was that the cloud was not taking over the entire IT universe. Forrester gives itself an A for this prognostication. Countering the cloud hype machine, Forrester believes that not every current workload is appropriate for public clouds. “And we started to see early signs of enterprises recognizing that the private cloud isn’t the new name for virtualization but is indeed a separate environment and not all apps in the data center are destined for this pool,” Forrester analyst James Staten said.

Next up was predicting that mobile will be fundamentally driven by the cloud, meaning that mobile apps are and will be backed by the cloud. On the downside, enterprises have been slow to adopt mobile cloud services, and do extra work to tie mobile devices to on-premises applications.

SLAs were also on the agenda, and here Forrester advocated not stressing so much over these agreements. “While there is greater recognition that apps have to protect themselves, too many enterprises preferred to push for specific SLAs in their contract negotiations. While major cloud outages often prompt the desire for contracted SLAs, your own data center is no less susceptible than the clouds, so stop panicking over them,” Forrester said.

Cost modelling is one area where Forrester only gave itself a C. The company argued that cost modelling would be in high demand, and many vendors did have strong sales. But the pickup was less than expected. Where Forrester really blew it was predicting that infrastructure and operations (I&O) would let their shop’s development groups liberally create cloud apps. With I&O still often resisting the public cloud, Forrester gave itself a D. Cloud backup and disaster recovery was to be a hot topic and that was mostly true, with Forrester giving itself a B-.

Forrester saw DRaaS rising 23 percent in the last year. But this movement to cloud backup is often slow, said Forrester analyst Rachel Dines. “They are coming — slowly — because DR is something people invest in waves. Also, some may never be open to discussing it publicly because they see DR as a competitive differentiator.”

Forrester aced this next prediction where it said it wouldn’t consider cloud a commodity. Higher level networking and processing technology means that cloud services can be provided at a higher level. And specialized services are also on the rise. “In fact, you could argue the leading vendors are moving away from commoditization. AWS, IBM, HP, Rackspace (News - Alert), Google, and Microsoft ... none of them plan to race to the bottom, and each is moving up the value chain with high-performance, specialized offerings,” Forrester said.

While Gartner (News - Alert) sees Amazon AWS as the unrivaled cloud leader, at least in IaaS, Forrester was far more circumspect, promising last year not to think of AWS every time it thinks of the cloud, a notion that earned Forrester another A.

“While AWS continues to be the dominant player in the public cloud platform space, 2013 saw significant competitive growth and a growing stable of legitimate private clouds. Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Azure added IaaS capabilities, which lit a turbo charger under its growth and adoption Google, IBM, HP, and Salesforce.com ratcheted up their cloud platform plays significantly and saw strong growth as a result,” Forrester argued.

The penultimate prediction is the argument that virtualization, in and of itself, is not a cloud. Giving itself a C, Forrester has argued shops all too often label their VMware-based environments as private clouds.

“The cloudwashing award will once again go to enterprise I&O departments who continued to relabel their VMware environments as private clouds. As our Forrsights 2013 Hardware Survey showed, European and Asian enterprises are the worst offenders, viewing cloud as just a tool for advancing their own virtualization agenda,” Forrester said. Forrester, however, “found a variety of IT Ops teams who clearly understand the difference and are executing with this understanding. However, few of these environments offered self-service to the developer, fully-automated provisioning, standardized services, or cost transparency. Not because they don’t understand these requirements but because culture and organizational change is hard and takes time.”

In its last prediction that developers will learn that cloud development isn’t all that different, Forrester gained a B. “An expanded cloud developer survey showed that while cloud developers are younger, more open source-forward, and more mobile-centric, they continued to use the same languages, frameworks, and development methodologies we use in the enterprise,” Forrester said.