By Laurent Lachal

2013 Trends to Watch: Private and Public Clouds report drills downs into not only private and public cloud trends, but also infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) trends. The 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Services report looks at cloud computing from the point of view of IT service providers. Finally, 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing report looks at the way cloud service providers and consumers adapt to cloud computing both on their own and as part of increasingly sophisticated cloud ecosystems.

The “2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing” report explains that cloud computing promises to tackles two hitherto irreconcilable IT challenges: the need to reduce costs and the need to boost innovation. It takes a lot of effort from vendors and enterprises to actually make it work, and they will succeed in making it work in 2013, both on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems.

Indeed, cloud computing in all its guises (public, private, and hybrid) is building momentum, evolving fast and becoming increasingly “enterprise-grade”. Yet, it is early days for vendors and enterprises.

Cloud computing has barely reached the adolescence phase and it will take at least another five years for cloud computing to mature into adulthood.

2013 will also see the emergence of cloud computing ecosystem. Public clouds are increasingly approached not only as technology delivery platforms but also as “ecosystem hubs” for cloud service providers and consumers.

They offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile solution ecosystems of the Internet age. Some industry sectors are benefiting from the “data centre as a hub”, an increasingly cloud computing-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data centre such as around financial exchanges, web and online services, or media content.

Data will be the new cloud computing oil in 2013

Cloud computing services, and the (social, mobile) applications that cloud platforms underpin, generate a lot of data, which in turn requires cloud services and applications to make sense of it.

This trend connects with and fuels other industry trends such as the Internet of things (machine-to-machine communication and data processing, cloud computing-based smart cities, TVs or cars projects), open government data, consumerisation of IT (with a variety of cross-device content centric public clouds, such as the one provided by Apple), and, last but not least, Big Data.

The market’s attention, under the Big Data banner, is currently mostly focused on technology issues, but from 2013 onward from a cloud computing perspective there will be growing interest in the cultural shift required by vendors and enterprises to turn data into a resource to manage and monetize, starting with data abstraction (from underlying IT systems), sharing (within and outside the enterprise), and valuation (via a model from companies such as Accenture).

Some vendors played the cloud data card early , but the cloud data production, brokerage, and consumption ecosystem is still in the making and will continue to evolve over the next five years.

About the author and Ovum

Laurent Lachal is Senior Analyst at Ovum. Jointly awarded IIAR Global Analyst Firm of the Year 2012, Ovum provides clients with independent and objective analysis that enables them to make better business and technology decisions. Its research draws upon over 400,000 interviews each year with business and technology, telecoms and sourcing decision-makers, giving Ovum and its clients unparalleled insight, not only into business requirements but also the technology that organizations must support. Ovum is an Informa business.