The cloud computing label is applied to several technologies and is laden with vendor and industry hype yet we must acknowledge there is something to it. This is important to software developers who know that the next big thing will impact their employability. Savvy career minded programmers are always improving their skill sets and preparing for the next must have tech. For enterprises, cloud has been ranked among the top 5 peak expenditure priorities for this year with a percentage of twenty as per the spending survey conducted by Cowen and company. Over 50% of enterprises have the intent to buy Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services from an IT services provider.

For digital and SMAC-based initiatives this year, funding is anticipated to grow 7 to 8 times against typical IT Services resources. The IT expenditure survey used 95 reactions from companies that represent over $51M in IT expenditure and based on the results, the respondents are forecasting 5.4% growth in the second half CY 2015 IT services spending as compared to the first half CY2015. The survey also had numbers of verticals which included: 36% of respondents in financial services, 25% in Manufacturing, 16% in Healthcare Pharm, 14% in retail, 5% in Hospitality and Entertainment and 4% in Healthcare Payer. The respondents’ roles ranged from COO, CIO, CEO, CSO, CTO, CFO as well as IT executives and IT senior management.

The key take-away points are listed below:

Great Onset Market Adoption

There has been a report of significant implementation of the cloud of 77% and a very high likelihood of more processes to be transferred to that podium. The developments being made by enterprises with cloud acceptance in recent surveys shows how cloud computing stratagems for enterprises are maturing.

Good Market Reception

With over 50% of enterprises planning to acquire their Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions from an IT services provider, the research team (Cowen and Company) has a firm belief that the already prevailing relationships and trust among enterprises’ senior administration teams and the IT services Teams explains the domination of IT services Providers in this region.

New Market Adoption Plans in Progress

Over the next 12-18 months, 73% of respondents are expected to implement Microsoft Azure. Cisco and Citrix Cloud Platform both at 44% as well as VMware Hybrid Cloud at 36% are the providers most mentioned by enterprises as they expect to use them in subsequent twelve to eighteen months.

Cloud Workload Capacity

It is expected that through the subsequent three year period, 21 to 30% of apps will be SaaS-based as forecasted by majority of enterprise senior executives. About 40% of enterprises will contain about 25% to 49% of their workload in public clouds in 5 years.

Application Budget Increase

Sales force had a substantial leap from 39% to 43% of respondents that expect their resources to significantly grow for the CRM vendor’s app and solutions. All this between the month of December 2014 and May 2015. Enterprises are depending more widely in SMAC-based technologies to reinforce their selling strategies and lead generation as shown by LinkedIn B2B focus. Thus, 57% of enterprises expect their budget to increase mostly for LinkedIn, Salesforce and Adobe apps in the next twelve months.

Budget Increase for Data Platform Vendors and Analytics

It was established that OpenSource and cloud vendors were emphasized as receiving bigger budget growths consistently this year in relation to the custom.  It is also Cowen and Company’s research team belief that infrastructure investment is projected to improve further than business intelligence (BI) investment. Informatica, DataStax, Horton Works and Amazon are the four major analytics and data platform vendors that are expected by enterprises to see the biggest budget increased in 2015. As a result of this, the next-gen data platform vendors are expected to achieve a larger spending rise as compared to the next-gen BI vendors.

Variety Database and Applications

The most evaluated database alternatives when installing new applications comprise Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA. It is important to note that in a most recent survey, IBM showed a big decrease in expenditure plans which dropped from 36% in December 2014 to 26%!

Future Spending Priorities

The peak expenditure priorities for enterprises in2015 are Application development with a percentage of 34, managed services taking 27%, ERP implementations following with 22% and cloud with 20%. The Cowen and Company Research team found that the respondents are mainly focused on DevOps as a way to continually generate new applications and retain existing code all the while warranting an even and uninterrupted delivery cycle. There are many enterprises struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing information need of their customers and as such orchestrating and turbo-charging internal application development is a causative factor to improved SMAC- based technology investment.

Ultimately, the biggest difference between a web application and any enterprise application (including in the cloud) is the strict separation of the business logic layer and the web services layer. A typical web application is more concerned with delivering content while an enterprise application is concerned with processing and persistence.