Also posted on LinkedIN

I believe 2016 is the start of something very different in our industry. It is going to be an epic battle between Amazon, Google and Microsoft in landing companies in their cloud. These big players will continue to one-up each other providing larger, more robust, feature rich cloud services that are a value add to every business on the planet.

We will continue to see announcements like the one yesterday that Apple is leveraging Google’s cloud. Does that mean Amazon loses? Not necessarily. It just means that these large cloud providers will have to fight to land and retain customers. My prediction is that customers of all sizes will leverage more than one cloud. It comes down to how much of that pie that each cloud provider will get. That means customer retention is paramount. Today companies have more flexibility than ever when it comes cloud services. They can shift from one to the other based on their business needs. Choosing a cloud is like choosing a carrier for your phone. You can change when you want to. That means the service from each of these cloud providers must truly solve the customer problems. Cloud offerings must be scaleable, stable, secure, cost effective and easy to deploy/use.

To address this demand, the titans are expanding their global portfolio of infrastructure capacity. This takes big investment and time, but the speed and scale of this growth is unprecedented. There is a staggering amount of capacity being added to each portfolio.  All three have massive bets in motion all over the globe. The big question is who will win? Ultimately, the customers will. They have more choice and more mature offerings than ever. CIOs are shifting from infrastructure managers to cloud service portfolio managers. This shift means that the cloud providers will also win. Heavy Reading predicted back in 2013 that the mobile cloud market opportunity alone will grow to $1 Trillion by 2017. Based on the growth I am seeing, that prediction is coming true. Bottom line, that is a lot of opportunity to go around. The titans will continuously battle to take the largest piece of the pie, but everyone is going to eat well as long as they prove they deserve a seat at the table.

It is an awesome time to be in this business!