Last week at Microsoft’s annual Hosting Partner Summit in Bellevue, Washington, Bob Muglia (President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business) during his keynote address said that 50% of the world’s servers, a number which he estimated to currently stand at 30 million units, will be hosted in the cloud within 10 years.
My guess is that less than 20% of all servers are in the hands of service providers today. I’ve heard Lance Crosby, CEO of Softlayer, estimate the current number to be closer to 10%. If either Lance or I are even close to being correct (and I’m confident we are), then Bob’s prediction has bigger implications on IT systems vendors than the rest of the world seems to realize.IT systems vendors still cater almost exclusively to the enterprise market.
Service providers have different needs than enterprise customers: multi-tenant architectures, automated provisioning, portal integration, and multi-tenant support workflows to name just a few. Security models are fundamentally different in a multi-tenant service provider world, and will become even more specialized as this multi-tenant world becomes virtualized and abstracted from discrete system hardware.
Rackspace’s announcement yesterday that its Cloud Computing division has grown to 11% of its total revenue, and is its fastest-growing business unit, tells us that this transition to highly-virtual on-demand IaaS is rapidly underway. Traditional IT systems vendors are slowly getting the point, as demonstrated by IBM’s acquisition this week of Cast Iron Systems
This is only the beginning.
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