On the 5th of September, a group of 13 executives from high-growth, innovative cloud companies in Europe identified the most disruptive trend in their business as the shift to everything as software.
The mix of founders, co-founders, CEOs, and VPs are members of IDC’s Cloud Research Innovation Council (RIC). IDC is currently running four Research Innovation Councils (AI, Security, Blockchain and Cloud) that have each created a community of leading IDC analysts and business leaders that cut across emerging and established companies. The RICs provide a professional framework that offers an ideal setting for an open discussion.
In the first virtual meeting of the cloud RIC, members largely concurred that everything-as-software changes the business model for cloud services companies away from cloud migrations and towards development of cloud native applications. It impacts the cloud market at every level: cloud services demand shifts from straight forward migrations to cloud-native application development and operations, infrastructure shifts to containers and serverless functions, cloud management needs to evolve and optimise for everything as software/code.
This is crucial, as cloud is the foundation for innovation and digital transformation for European organizations across all industries; the cloud market presents a great opportunity for start-ups and scale-ups to grow fast. European organizations are forecast to spend USD 45 billion in 2019 on public cloud services (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS), according to the latest update of the IDC Semi-annual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. In addition, IDC expects the market for cloud-related services to be an additional 45 billion USD.
IDC’s latest research shows that the top 3 drivers for public cloud adoption in Europe are speed, security and agility (Source: IDC European CloudView Survey, 2018 (N=1,350):
Adopting the cloud is no longer primarily about economics and agility. It is becoming enterprises’ most critical, and dependable source of sustained technology innovations, as innovative technologies like machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, blockchain and IoT are available for everyone through the cloud and digital transformation drives the need for organizations to develop new cloud-native applications to create immersive experiences for their customers.
For this reason, IDC recognized a need to connect a community of cloud innovators, and so the Cloud Research Innovation Council was born.
IDC has received enthusiastic interest and feedback from the cloud community, who see the value of participating in such a forum which can support them in their strategic decision making.
IDC hand-selected and invited the following cloud innovation council members to the inaugural research innovation council:
- Cloudeon – https://www.cloudeon.com/
- Cloudreach – https://www.cloudreach.com/
- Densify – https://www.densify.com/
- Grapeup – https://grapeup.com/
- Matillion – https://www.matillion.com/
- Nodes – https://www.nodesagency.com
- Nordcloud – https://nordcloud.com/
- Ohpen – https://www.ohpen.com/
- Open Xchange – https://www.open-xchange.com/
- Morpheus – https://www.morpheusdata.com
- Pipedrive – https://www.pipedrive.com
- Red Hat – https://www.redhat.com/en
- Scality – https://www.scality.com/
- Sumologic – https://www.sumologic.com
- UpCloud – https://www.upcloud.com
- Yellowdog – https://yellowdog.co
Over the coming months, IDC will be publishing profiles of participating members and key insights from the topics uncovered during the council meetings.