A year goes by extremely quickly, and now we are at the end of November, less than a month from Christmas and the New Year. This is one of the magical moments of the year, with the spirit of holiday cheer being absorbed into all parts of life.
As we hit the end of the year, we also hear from the numerous research firms about their findings for the year ahead. Collected from industry analysts, economic data, and organizational surveys, this helps technology executives strategize and make their decisions for the coming year. At Perficient, we also leverage this data to understand the priorities of our customers and provide a mix of custom and standard solutions that drive digital transformation.
The latest numbers are consistent with a messaging that we’ve heard all year: cloud has arrived, and it has arrived in full force. Just as we explained the spending numbers in March, cloud spending and adoption are expected to increase as we accelerate towards 2020. Here are some takeaways from CIO:
- Cloud adoption continues to move forward. 70% of organizations are already in the cloud with 16% planning something in the next year. Another 14% intend to migrate some form of infrastructure in the next 3 years.
- Of all the IT environments currently deployed, 45% are in the cloud, with at least half still in private deployments. By the end of next year, 59% of IT environments will be in the cloud and decision-makers expect a bigger share of the market in public and hybrid deployments.
What about the Priorities?
It’s clear that adoption for cloud continues to accelerate, which means that the industry is strong and invested in innovation. In looking at the spending needs and the trends that have appeared this year, we believe these are some of the salient priorities for 2017 (and agreed upon by research firm Forrester):
- Migration – We wrote about migration earlier this year with our Beacon Award win at IBM Interconnect around our Immersion Solution. As the cost of migration continues to decline, Forrester anticipates the strategy to increase in interest. Integration too, will continue the trend of migration as organizations see the value of sharing data between applications.
- Containers and Microservices – Application development saw a great deal of transformation in 2016 with the popularization of DevOps, a philosophy built around collaboration and continuous innovation. Alongside the rise of DevOps is the increased adoption of containers and microservices, which build applications piece by piece as opposed to large projects. Look for more organizations to leverage these two technologies to achieve application optimization and lower costs.
- Hybrid Cloud – Many organizations still continue to use on-premises private cloud. However, as complete cloud transformation becomes more of the norm, many will seek to optimize by leveraging Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions, which facilitate faster scalability and automated build-out.
- Application Hosting – Finally, 2017 will see more organizations running their applications in the cloud. Not only will this lower costs, but it will also create opportunities to gain insight into how an application fits into the business needs of an organization.
Learn More
What are your cloud plans for 2017? Reach out to us at sales@perficient.com to begin a conversation and learn about our expertise in the field.
Learn more about our IBM partnership here.
