Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 99

with the news of the day because doing so demonstrates the importance
to the industry of having a discursive apparatus at work to offset critical
concerns raised by journalists and researchers.
Gartner describes itself as “the world's leading information technology
research and advisory company” and boasts, “We deliver the technology-
related insight necessary for our clients to make the right decisions, every
day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government
agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and pro-
fessional services irms, to technology investors, we are the valuable partner
to clients in 12,400 distinct organizations” (Gartner 2013). Even dis-
counting for the hyperbole that often accompanies such self-descriptions,
there is general agreement that the company exerts considerable inluence
in the IT industry through its research and forecasting. As a result, it
can command top dollar for its assessments. A Gartner report, described
shortly, forecasts the development of the cloud through 2016, runs to nine
pages, and costs $9,995. Like its counterparts at Deloitte and Forrester,
Gartner's predictions about cloud computing have contributed substan-
tially to promoting the vision of unrelenting expansion. For example,
in July 2012, in an article headlined “Gartner: Cloud putting crimp in
traditional software, hardware sales” the company's “cloud forecaster”
predicted that the sector would grow by 19 percent in 2012, going from
$91 billion in 2011 to $109 billion. By 2016 Gartner expects it to be a
$207 billion industry, which, while still representing a small percentage
of the total IT sector, nevertheless means that it will be growing con-
siderably faster than the overall sector (Butler 2012a). This rosy forecast
came a few weeks after even rosier predictions about consumer adoption
of the cloud. While only 7 percent of consumer data was stored in the
cloud at the time of the forecast, it concludes that by 2016 the cloud will
contain 36 percent of all such data. This will result in increased demand
throughout the industry for data centers, for synchronization services, and
for lawless uploading and downloading capacity. According to Gartner,
“Cloud storage will grow with the emergence of the personal cloud, which
in turn will simplify the direct-to-cloud model, allowing users to directly
store user-generated content in the cloud” (ibid.). Aside from some minor
potential problems such as the threat of commoditization as personal stor-
age expands, the immediate future is clearly positive for the expanding
cloud. The Gartner results spread widely among those producing cloud