Sea Change in Large Enterprises’ Cloud Strategic Intent

For five years we at Everest Group have tracked the cloud space in global services. Until this year, there was a lot of talk about cloud, but much true cloud adoption was driven in business units with large enterprises. CIOs basically sat out the game and watched the cloud’s performance. But since the beginning of 2014 we’ve seen a real shift in large enterprise CIO organizations, which signals a significant change for the services industry.

Until recently CIOs in large enterprises were reluctant to put cloud initiatives in place because they felt it was premature. They struggled with compliance and security questions. And they worked to make sure their organization understands and embrace cloud and as-a-service technologies. Their posture is moving from cautiously watching to actively planning and driving, and some have large initiatives underway. Their plans with regard to cloud have moved from the radical fringe to mainstream strategic intent to embrace and drive.

Large enterprise tech budgets are still controlled by the CIO organization because they are best able to drive technology initiatives to scale and to execute initiatives across functions.

This is a very important development and will cause significant changes in the technology and services industry. This undoubtedly will start to drive a significant shift in spend from the traditional structures into the cloud and as-a-service models. As that occurs, we believe it will pick up momentum and pull the rest of the industry through.