Cloud is no less than the era of e-biz: Gartner

MUMBAI, INDIA: With all the talks about cloud gathering strength, Gartner feels that Cloud Computing is heralding an evolution of Business, just like that of E-Business. After many years of germination, the core ideas at the heart of cloud computing – pay for use, muli-tenancy, external services – appear to be resonating more strongly for more people.

Stephen Prentice, vice president and Gartner fellow , said, “Cloud computing heralds an evolution of business – no less influential than the era of e-business – in positive and negative ways. Overall, there are very real trends toward cloud platforms and also towards massively scalable processing.

Gartner analysts said they are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises, and an explosion of supply-side activity as technology providers maneuver to exploit the growing commercial opportunity.

Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, said, “The potential benefits of cloud are a shift from ’capacity’ on demand to ‘capability’ on demand, a reduced cost of computing resources and a shift from technology use to ‘value’ consumption.”

Virtualization, service orientation and the Internet have converged to sponsor a phenomenon that enables individuals and businesses to choose how they’ll acquire or deliver IT services, with reduced emphasis on the constraints of traditional software and hardware licensing models.”

There continues to be great diversity of activity, maturity and growth among the many different elements of the overall cloud services marketplace.

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