At the end of the year – and in this case the end of a decade – I thought it made sense to look back at what has been and try and predict what may be. Many already have named 2010 the year of Cloud Computing, so I decided to call on Google Trends to put this into a little perspective.
Below you see the results, I expect you may be as (pleasantly) surprised as I was.
As I personally spend the last decade dabbling in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Service Management (ITIL) and Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) I used these as anchor points for this perspective. In addition I decided to include Cloud Computing’s slightly more mature nephew (SaaS) also in to the fold. The epiphany for me personally was that it explained why I had found it so hard to choose between SOA, PPM and ITIL (design, build and run). But enough about me.
The rise of Cloud Computing’s from zero to hero in just 2 years is amazing. And with regard to news volume, shown in the bottom graph, it actually has already surpassed the others. But even more amazing is the geographic areas in which each term has the highest relative interest. For me it reinforced where the true competition of the future will be coming from, and it is not from the traditional countries. Sure, Australia is big on ITIL and the UK is big on SaaS. For Ireland, the only other European county in the top 10, the data was inconclusive on whether their current deep economic crisis makes them more eager or the Irish weather stimulates queries on clouds. The outlier for SOA in Dutch is unfortunately a fluke. It is not because we are all striving to be brilliant OO programmers here, I am afraid it is because SOA is a Dutch acronym for something complety different (which I was directed not to mention here).
So are we done for 2011? All that needs to be said about cloud computing has been googled? Not yet.
As you can see Cloud Computing has surpassed Saas (Score 5.3) and is closing in on SOA (score 8.8), ITIL (score 8.4) and PPM (score 7.6). But any comparison with IT terms like Linux, Mac and Windows is quit sobering. Cloud Computing is not a household name yet.
But 2010 is still young, so I am sure we can propel it some more.
PS want to have some fun yourself, here is the URL of this Cloud Application: http://www.google.com/trends?q=cloud+computing%2C+saas%2C+itil%2C+ppm+%2C+soa&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
Tune Into The Cloud 