Ovum predicts data will be ‘cloud computing oil’ in 2013

So says analyst Ovum in its latest 'trends to watch' publications, on public and private cloud, cloud services and cloud computing generally, Laurent Lachal, senior analyst at Ovum Software and author of the latter report, reckons that although it takes a lot of effort from vendors and enterprises to make cloud computing shine, "they will succeed in 2013, both on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems". He reckons that all types – public, private, and hybrid cloud – are building momentum and evolving fast, but adds that it's still early days. "Cloud computing has barely reached the adolescence phase and it will take at least another five years for cloud computing to mature into adulthood," quips Lachal. That said, he expects 2013 to see the emergence of cloud computing ecosystems, with public clouds no longer just technology delivery platforms but '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," explains Lachal. More radically, Lachal believes that data will be "the new cloud computing oil in 2013". Making the point that cloud computing services – and the applications that cloud platforms underpin – generate a lot of data, he notes that these, in turn, require cloud services and applications to make sense of it all. "This trend connects with and fuels other industry trends, such as the Internet of things [machine-to-machine communication and data processing etc], consumerisation of IT [cross-device content-centric public clouds] and, last but not least, Big Data," he predicts. "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," he adds.