SMBs Will Be The Dominant Market In The Cloud, Says Parallels
Head of automation and virtualisation software company, Parallels is betting big on the cloud. But Serguei Beloussov says operating system consolidation and standards will be key.
Beloussov justifies his strategy, saying “the cloud computing infrastructure business is exploding right now”.
“It’s been evolving for the past nine years, when we first started the company. But it’s part of a very complex chain. If you think about it, the worldwide IT market is worth about $3.5 trillion (£2.1 trillion), and of that, about $1.3 trillion (£787 billion) is the market for SMBs. Maybe about $15 billion (£9.1 billion) of that is now cloud computing, where in ten years from now, that may grow to about $500 billion (£302.7 billion).
“So SMBs will not have a server infrastructure and that’s a huge change. Otherwise, once that change happens, because it’s so large, it will start to reach a critical mass.
“But a lot of things have to fit into place for this to work – there should be data centres near enough, ISPs [internet service providers] and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. So there’s a lot of interest from the space, from newcomers as well as the established hosting firms. These include telcos, distribution companies and resellers, who want to become service providers. And now, all of those strategic players – like Dell, HP and Microsoft – at the highest levels, are directly interested in mass-market cloud,” he said.
SMBs have no money to buy servers
He added that the economic crisis and ongoing instability was pushing faster cloud adoption. “SMBs have no money to buy servers,” he stated. “Maybe before they would buy their servers because it was more convenient that way. So now they are looking for services instead. And generally crises are good times for a paradigm shift, when people are more likely to change. When everything’s good, people are reluctant to change.
“In general, one of the problems of IT is that it is complicated and right now SMBs have no time or money for complications, where the cloud is less so. They may have been able to buy servers based on a total cost of ownership annualised over three years, where they had predicted to grow by 100 stores or 100 branches or something. But right now they don’t know if they are going to grow at all next year. And you can pay service providers monthly, so you can basically pay for what you use,” he added.
But SMBs would definitely lead the charge for cloud, in Beloussov’s opinion: “Large enterprises don’t necessarily have the same problems, because they have economies of scale. And they can afford to pursue cloud computing internally,” said.
“But for SMBs, the cloud offers flexibility and simplicity,” he explained. “With large enterprises, the problems they are trying to solve with the cloud – with VMware-type and Amazon-type infrastructures – are at the service level: service ability and scalability. And the Amazons and Microsofts of this world don’t want open standards, they want everyone using their standards.”
