Trends In Cloud Computing Space In 2020

The cloud market has been growing for the past couple of years in terms of usage, adaption and Revenues, and will continue to grow in the year 2020 at the same pace if not even better. As we come to the end of the year 2019, we have seen the market perspective change the way the buyers look at the Cloud Adoption. With Cloud almost completely finding its way into almost every business, it is not surprising that the view from the buyer is now more of a commodity buy.

The big market shares continue to majorly remain with 2 predominant choices Azure and AWS, the rest are still trying to get a foot in the door. Today a cloud subscription has become more or less similar to the choice of your Telcom provider for your mobile where you can choose from a max of 3 to 4 players that are out there in the market. But if you see the infrastructure that they are based on or the technology that they are based on, they are more or less the same. So, you do not find any major differences to consider while choosing between these players except for price and value-added services.

The 2020, begins with the challenge for the cloud providers to fully acknowledge that their offerings have been fully commoditized and they are building market acquisition strategies around the same. With very little differences between the technology offerings, it will become increasingly difficult to close deals only with a Cloud technology offering discussion. Most businesses who are moving to cloud are increasingly looking for bundle offerings that range from support on technology modernization, managed services for the cloud workloads, Support on Go-to-Market and brand building, people enablement etc. and most importantly, consumer wants all of these extra value adds without an extra cost apart from his cloud consumption.  

This means today, the cloud is no longer selling on its own. The smart cloud service providers are bracing themselves for 2020 with preparations on how to engulf their cloud offerings with a lot of value-added services and keep it with no additional cost burden which will help them create a difference and step away from the current commodity market. 

Having said this, this calls for rapid change for the cloud players in the industry in the way they perceive this market. The cloud providers should start looking at different and more innovative approaches for creating long term relationships with consumers which can really keep them loyal and as already quoted, engulfing the cloud with various value-added services and also doing it in a more prominent fashion can help here. Some vendors already offer a lot of value-added services along with the cloud, but the need of the Year 2020 is to get more serious about these offerings, especially for the ones that are non-formal which means offers which are most probably not a part of an SLA. They will need to start bringing in these value-added services as a part of the SLA. 

So, as the year 2020 progresses, you are going to see a lot more packaged value offerings that are going to come out in the cloud space. And this is all good and sweet to the business consumer for the cloud. Also, an increasing trend we can notice is a huge rise in the maturity of the market today, at least if you are strictly talking about India, we are looking at a market that is becoming very intelligent and more focused on the kind of value they are able to extract. Closing deals purely on the basis of a relationship and connections which were the kind of scenarios we once continuously envisioned for a couple of years or even decades may be harder to find in 2020 as the market becomes smarter, demanding and value-driven.

Also, traditionally, Cloud Providers provided free cloud Solution architecture as a value-added services to most customers moving to the cloud, but this was more a customer retention strategy than a value-added service, as the solution designed would target to use as many propriety services as possible to make movement to any other cloud as difficult as possible. 

But the trend that one can see now is that people are shying away from such offers. You are going to see that people now want to stay neutral on the cloud, they want to be flexible to move to any of the cloud platforms and offerings easily. This kind of maturity that you are going to continue to increasingly see makes it's definitely all good for the consumer. 

Apart from this, the other important trend that you can observe in the year 2020 will be a huge increase in the focus on startups and SMBs. That is because the enterprise businesses that are available in this space are already captured or basically lost which means the efforts there to grow the market by the cloud players are most probably going to decrease. This doesn’t mean there will not be any growth here, there will be but mostly just the organic growth. That means the customer himself will be growing and thus increase his consumption in the cloud but there will only be very few accounts that one can newly acquire. Hence, you are going to see cloud players majorly focusing on startups & SMBs and you are going to see a lot of smaller deals but larger in terms of count. 

In the technology space point of view, one can definitely anticipate more and continuous innovations. With the competition being so high currently and cloud becoming a commodity, you can expect new features and components coming up while each cloud player tries to outplay the other and try to stay ahead of the competition. So innovations are definitely coming up, especially in terms of data storage, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, etc. You are going to see all of this getting more prominent, more mileage and usage and become more visible in day-to-day operations of businesses in India

So what you are going to see overall in the year 2020 is basically the cloud market growing leaps and bounds and getting more and more aggressive with a growth rate of definitely more than 100 per cent, and if they're an improvement in the overall economy maybe even a 200 per cent could be possible.