Much of the talk about business moving to the cloud is hype says Gartner.
However, the shift has begun and most will be working there in a decade.
Gartner says only 50 million big-company cloud office users work with services like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 now. That sounds a lot, but it is just eight percent of the worldwide market.
The research company said the big shift will start in early 2015 and that by 2017 a third of those workers will be cloud-based. In 2022 that will reach 60 percent.
You’ve got to ask yourself how Gartner reached these numbers. It’s easy enough to measure what people are doing today – just look at software licence sales. Getting numbers for the next couple of years isn’t hard, ask people about their intentions.
But predicting numbers for almost a decade out? Surely that depends on software company plans as much as anything.
Recently Adobe decided to shift all its creative software to the cloud, if Microsoft makes a similar decision with Office, then everyone will head to the cloud whether they want to or not.
It’s going to take a long time, mainly because people don’t renew a Word or Excel license every year, so any change is unnecessary for non-mobile workers (which afaik still make up the majority) and is a cost increase instead of savings. It will be people moving from XP right now, but the people on 7 won’t need to do anything about their Office suite for another 5-10 years.
From what I’ve done/seen it is still a ‘looks good on paper’ deal, where inconsistencies, non-uniform UX and bad mobile broadband can make problems where there were no issues beforehand.