Cloud computing enthusiasts face seven-year wait

Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner, reckons that, despite the current excitement and growth, that’s likely to be the timeframe before service-enabled application platforms (SEAPs) become mainstream. “As SEAP technologies mature during the next several years, Gartner foresees three distinct, but slightly overlapping, phases of evolution,” says Driver. “The first phase, through 2011, will be that of the pioneers; the second, running from 2010 through 2013, will be all about market consolidation; while the third phase, from 2012 through 2015, will see mainstream critical mass and commoditisation,” he adds. Driver believes that application development organisations should be looking to cloud computing for tactical projects until 2011. After that, he predicts a surge of new vendors, followed by the usual period of consolidation as cloud computing becomes appealing to mainstream application development companies on the run up to 2015.