Cloud is hyping. One of the indicators is to watch if VC money is following in the direction of the cloud computing and cloud software. I’m not pretending to analyze trends of venture capital – this is clearly “beyond beyond PLM” capacity. At the same time, the following article caught my attention earlier last week – Future of Cloud Survey Shows significance of Open Source by North Bridge. For those of your not aware about NB, you can take a look on their portfolio page. You can find that NB invested in several CAD-related companies in the past – SolidWorks (sold to Dassault System), Revit Technology (sold to Autodesk), SpaceClaim, Newforma and some others.
NorthBridge seems to be shifts their focus to cloud computing. Navigate your browser to the following link to explore the Future of Cloud Computing. Don’t miss their twitter account – @futureofcloud. The article I was mentioned earlier speaks about of the survey NB made related to the cloud computing in 2011. Here are the most interesting passages I found there.
We found 40% of respondents are only experimenting with cloud computing at this point. Another 26% of survey respondents reported they are waiting for more maturity in the market before adopting a cloud strategy. In terms of current cloud use, 13% indicated complete confidence for mission critical applications, while 11 percent of respondents cited usage spikes. This shows that while cloud computing is indeed just getting started for a majority of the market, there is current production use of cloud computing that is significant…. The significance of saving money with cloud computing was reinforced by the fact that 55% of respondents believe the cloud has a lower total cost ownership (TCO) and only 13% indicating a higher TCO in the cloud.
NorthBridge is running a new survey – 2012 NorthBridge Future of Cloud Computing. Navigate here if you want to share your opinion.
What is my conclusion? Engineering, manufacturing and enterprises is a complex space characterized by slow speed of changes and sophisticated dependencies and eco-system. It is interesting to see how VC long time invested in companies in the enterprise domain shifts their interest to cloud computing. Actually, I can see it as a promising fact that can create an alternative to the kingdom of four big companies in this space. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Freebie. NorthBridge didn’t pay me to write about their cloud initiative.
