As 2016 draws to a close, we turn our attention to the predictions we made at the start of the year.
Posted on 28 December 2016 -
BY Tibus
We had a stab at trying to guess how the cloud hosting landscape might change during 2016. In this blog post, we look back at those predictions and see if they materialised over the past 12 months.
The beginning of the end for mid-tier, generalist cloud providers, and a need for cloud hosting providers who don’t want to gradually fade away against the unstoppable power of the big boys to carve out a niche if they want to survive.
It’s an ongoing process, but that’s certainly the direction of travel. Datanyse suggests that Amazon AWS has a 13.7% market share of the world’s top 1 million websites at present, having added a further 149,568 customers among those top level websites between January and November 2016. It also announced price cuts in the past few weeks, which will further undermine rival providers who are aiming to compete on low price alone.
The role of the application will continue to grow in 2016.
Arguably, yes. In our tech predictions for 2017, we’re envisaging containerisation becoming more prevalent over the next 12 months and going mainstream in 2018. We couldn’t see that happening this time last year, but enough factors have swung away from potential issues with legacy and homogenous IT environments towards the undoubted benefits of containerisation to make us think that applications - and hosting them more effectively - are going to be increasingly important.
Apple could enter the public cloud market with a business-led offering and it might succeed in it, too.
Sort of. There was certainly no big unveiling of a new cloud hosting product aimed at the business sector, which is perhaps what we were getting at in our prediction, but there was a subtle move in this direction. The launch of macOS Sierra in September brought with it several improvements to the existing iCloud storage platform, which made life easier in enterprise. For example, Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch all work together more seamlessly via iCloud thanks to a combination of new features. On its own website, Apple tells customers reading the iCloud Drive page: “Start your work in one app. Add the finishing touches in another.” So this seems to be more about business than pleasure.
