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nuance—some cloud markets will grow faster than others, and much will
depend on the overall state of the world economy. But on balance, cloud
computing will continue to advance as a central force in the global IT
economy. It is dificult to determine whether this forecast proved accurate
because there is no clear measuring stick and many companies, including
industry leaders like Amazon, do not separately identify cloud-computing
revenues. The estimate of the total cloud market appears reasonable, but
that for the public SaaS market most likely overstates its actual growth.
The point is that the speciic forecast is less important than its trajectory,
whose arrow almost universally supports the promotional discourse.
Once again, the report and its optimistic forecast circulated widely.
This was particularly important because Amazon Web Services had suf-
fered a major outage shortly before it appeared and commentators were
pleased to see that Forrester's indings were able to relieve some of the
understandable anxieties about the cloud marketplace. A blog that serves
CIOs headlined its coverage “Forrester: Public Cloud to Surge, Especially
SaaS.” More important is its summary connected to the AWS failure:
“Long after the buzz about Amazon's two-day cloud outage dies down,
the public cloud will be a growth trajectory” (O'Neill 2011). The article
goes on to repeat Forrester's growth projections, all heading upward,
to the year 2020. The Forrester report made it easier to view the failure
at Amazon, in spite of signiicant coverage by journalists, as an isolated
event rather than as a portent of disasters to come (Miller 2011). There
certainly was no guarantee that potential cloud customers would quickly
come back to the cloud given the widespread negative reaction to the
Amazon event. Consider this from one IT executive: “'We don't think
the cloud is enterprise-ready,' said Jimmy Tam, general manager of Peer
Software, which provides data backup for businesses. 'Are you really going
to trust your corporate jewels to these cloud providers?'”(ibid.). This was
certainly no isolated comment, as others also chimed in: “'Clearly you're
not in control of your data, your information,' said Campbell McKellar,
founder of Loosecubes, a Web site for inding temporary workspace that
was among those that lost service. 'It's a major business interruption. I'm
getting business interruption insurance tomorrow, believe me, and maybe
we get a different cloud provider as a backup'” (ibid.). It is impossible
to say whether Forrester's afirmation of the surging cloud succeeded in
calming fears, but it is important to contrast the Forrester predictions
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