Report Indicates Primary Cloud Growth Coming from SMB Sector

This past week a report has been released by OnApp, a leading cloud hosting software company, from a June survey that shows 49 percent of global cloud providers expect the growth of cloud services to come primarily from the small business sector over the next twelve months. This finding supports statements made recently by non-profit organization EuroCloud’s Vice-Chairman Phil Wainwright in an interview that claimed small businesses in the U.K. were a driving factor for growth in Europe’s cloud community. ONApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl was not totally surprised by the findings and said that it showed how adoption is being led by SMBs. "As more cloud providers enter the market we're seeing a broader range of industries beginning to take advantage of hosted cloud services," he said. When discussing the enterprise sector and its impact on cloud service growth, the survey revealed that 27 percent of those surveyed did expect their primary growth to come from enterprise, leaving only 17 percent of global cloud providers expecting to make the lion’s share of their cloud services growth from consumers. When taking a closer look at the expectations of the SMB market, the study revealed that 67 percent of those who anticipated growth from the SMB market predicted the majority of that growth to come from web and application developers. Many cited such advantages as the ability to scale IT services on demand, pay as you go service that allows them to only pay for the services they actually use, as well as the lower costs involved with not having to run their own IT department when using cloud services. A factor also mentioned was lower overall cost for just about any SMB looking at moving to cloud services in the next year. “Based on cloud adoption rates, our survey shows that cloud computing is most accessible to technical users right now,” stated Bredahl. “Adoption is being driven by small and medium sized businesses focused on application and web development. This makes sense, since sandboxed development, web development and testing are very well suited to a cloud environment. It’s easy to control costs during development, and as load increases. You can spin up a virtual machine, even if it’s just for an hour or two, because you only need to pay for the cloud as you use it.” The survey of 157 cloud providers was commissioned by OnApp and distributed by WebHostingTalk a premier web hosting discussion site, to gain a snapshot of what the hosting industries should be expecting in terms of the challenges it will face and business expectations for provisioning and selling hosted cloud services. Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and 'Liking' us on Facebook.