Forrester–Future of IT is not Cloud

The complete article on Future of IT is not Cloud can be found here. Below are my responses marked in blue.

Cloud computing is not the future of IT and Commoditization is, says analyst house Forrester, although the two support each other.

--> Amazon, MSFT Azure pretty much have there entire business model packaged around " selling cloud services as granular as possible". The Commoditization of cloud is currently at the platform service level, it has to be seen how the economics play around changing the Commoditization story around larger offering. The larger offerings like Sales Force, MS CRM, Office 365 are already in the market. A lot of organization have begun to see value in moving to the low level Commoditization as well using larger offering such as Office 365. The future play I presume, the direction is already set up for most organizations. What's to see how much more Commoditization can happen? I refer to old article on Cloud Computing Commoditization - Cloud Computing Commoditization.Which is dated 2009 , I guess unless you are living under a rock you will see how much progress has been made into this space.

Forrester says that as a result of commoditization and modernization, IT portfolios will evolve over time so that many applications will become suitable for cloud deployment, but many will not.

--->This is not a new statement its an line pulled out from the old reports "We all know in client server to 3 tier change era not all applications moved to 3 tier as there was no business justification.

James Staten, an analyst at Forrester, says in a report: "Not everything will move to the cloud as there are many business processes, data sets and workflows that require specific hardware or proprietary solutions that can't take advantage of cloud economics. For this reason we'll likely still have mainframes 20 years from now."

--->Cloud is broadly classified into 2 major areas Cloud Applications and Cloud Platforms. It’s a bold statement to make that all IT applications will move to the cloud in FY 2022, We know for sure this is a business decision and some very large investments have been made in technology in the past 3 decades which involve IP, proprietary solutions and standards moving to cloud should be seen first be the ROI lens both short & long term. So I would tend to agree with James but Forrester needs to go down into the trenches of each industry verticals come out with hard data on IT applications and potentially the % of conversion into cloud. That would require a lot of hard work, I'm sure there are plenty of consulting companies which are already equipped with that data as this is what is going to drive there sales in the coming years.

The "Make the Cloud Enterprise Ready" report, which is part of Forrester's "Playbook on Cloud Computing", urges CIOs to "leverage cloud services today and reap the early education from doing so" to gain competitive advantage in the future.

--->I think 40-60% CIO are past the education phase on cloud, A lot are experimenting to understand the ROI and long term benefits. So Forrester is little late here. A good gauge will be to dig into Amazon Enterprise customer data I'm sure some interesting results will be there.

The Playbook on Cloud Computing is a framework for adopting the cloud, going into detail on the benefits and disadvantages of public and private clouds, cloud economics, and addresses "cloud washing" - the efforts by a number of vendors in branding their "business-as-usual IT services" and virtualization products as "cloud" offerings.

--->Playbooks should go beyond Virtualization story peg the Cloud Platform Services story " that’s where the real meat is". Most organization today use virtualization . What they really need at this point a consulting company to walk the talk on cloud application migration of course with hard data in terms ROI.

The Make the Cloud Enterprise Ready report says: "Long term, enterprises will have a hybrid portfolio of cloud and non-cloud workload deployments that uses these options to optimize resource and agility requirements."

It adds: "In this future state the majority of system workloads will be cloud-resident while your own systems of record will evolve to cloud at a slower but deliberate pace. The end result will be a mixed environment managed through a decision tree and a series of workload automation systems that ensure governance and regulatory compliance across

this portfolio."

--->The Hybrid Cloud Story is quite a confusing term Find my research here Hybrid Cloud

The report also warns that those companies that have chosen a private cloud architecture as their main cloud strategy will not realize the savings that can be made through public cloud services or through an architecture that combines both public and private cloud IT capabilities - usually known as a hybrid cloud architecture.

--->Interesting but don’t agree as Private Cloud is initial strategy for most organization to move into cloud and eventually mature into public cloud. My research on private cloud can be found here Architecting the Private Cloud.

My parting words to Antony Sawas  author of the Forrester article we need factual data to support the text.