Month: February 2017

The Forecast is “Cloudy” for Large Companies

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Cloud Adoption among Large Companies is set to accelerate according to several McKinsey Studies.

  • Over one-third of companies will use public infrastructure as the primary environment for at least one workload by 2018
  • Large Enterprise Cloud Adoption Set to Accelerate, McKinsey CIO Study Finds
  • Past and future predictions for UCaaS growth

Past predictions didn’t hold true. Adoption of unified communications, and specifically Cloud and hosted unified communications, has been markedly below industry forecasts.  Data shows that market adoption of UCaaS is less than 25% of what was predicted by Gartner five years ago.  Why the low growth curve?

A number of reasons could have led to low UCaaS adoption:

  • Companies didn’t want to try what was “new” until it was proven and mature.
  • A shift in technology leaders and decision makers made it a difficult time to change technologies.
  • Past investments in multi-vendor technologies were too expensive to “dump” for a nearly equipment-free Cloud solution.

Future predictions are more credible. According to the most recent industry data, 60% to 70% of businesses will make a Cloud decision in the next two years.  Add to that the 25% of the companies who already use Cloud, but will consider new vendors as subscriptions expire, and we’re looking at about 90% of business that may be moving to the Cloud 2018.

As of late 2015, however, less than 25% of companies had made a firm Cloud decision. If the trends of the last five years continue UCaaS will grow as predicted?

UCaaS growth predictions are more believable than before because:

  • Cloud has become a mature product; the years have proven the challenges and benefits of Cloud solutions.
  • The big players are on board with Cloud; Cisco to Microsoft to Amazon, and many in between, have mature cloud computing and data center technologies that are on the brink of breaking out.
  • ROI is easier to forecast and implementation costs are minimal.

Sources: Continuant; Mckinsey; Gartner

Mike Schiano is founder and Managing Partner of Green Rain Media.