Will the ODCA help drive cloud uptake?

It is hard to determine exactly who the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) will benefit most if it proves successful: Intel and the cabal of server and software partners that have so far signed up, or the corporate IT departments looking for standardised, pre-tested, cloud-based software and infrastructure services that can be accurately compared and migrated between public, and even, private cloud suppliers whenever a better price is found.

For its part, Intel is nothing less than certain that cloud is the way to go for the majority of corporate IT departments, so much so that any organisation not jumping aboard risks undermining its ability to compete with commercial rivals.

“I’m not saying that everything will move into the cloud, but if people don’t do it, they will be running at a disadvantage,” says Intel cloud marketing director Alan Priestly. “IT organisations have to move to a different way of providing services, from a capex to an opex model – maybe in five years’ time only 30 per cent will be there, but it will move steadily.”

To some this may seem like the wishful thinking of tech marketing executives on the lookout for new revenue streams, but it is a view that has been amplified by recent analyst forecasts predicting a bumper harvest for cloud services over the next few years. Gartner predicted that the value of the global cloud market would exceed $68bn in 2010, while Forrester estimates it will be worth $241bn in 2020.

Other figures from the 451 Group are perhaps more realistic, suggesting that overall revenue from all cloud services was below $9bn in 2010 and will not even break $11bn in 2011, rising to $16.5bn in 2013.

“Most of the other market predictions for cloud computing are kitchen sink predictions, throwing everything in as a cloud service or product,” says the 451 Group CloudScape research director William Fellows. “Market sizing has been overplayed and, on the end-user side, most spending will be on-premise, whether we call it private cloud or not.”

Whatever the numbers, they often fly in the face of protestations from end users and on-premise software vendors who argue that the cloud is not an “all or nothing”, but more of a supplementary approach that will see a small percentage of data and services moving to an off-premise, pay-as-you-go model, but not all by any means.

Whether publicly or privately provided, the cloud model Intel outlines entails provisioning of software or hardware - software- or infrastructure-as-a-service (SaaS or IaaS) - packaged in virtual machines (VMs), hosted within a central datacentre and paid for on demand, with the money going either to an external service provider or another department within the same company, depending on internal billing and chargeback arrangements.