London, 3 June 2010 – A new report by consulting firm BroadGroup reveals that enterprise adoption of Private Cloud will accelerate over the next five years, and will boost the opportunity for third party data centre outsourcing. But hybrid cloud is seen as the next major opportunity where efficiencies can be gained by using public cloud for non-critical applications.

The report, Competing in the clouds:  emerging strategies for enterprise data centres, demonstrates that Private Cloud will be the fastest growing segment in the enterprise market. However, migrating to cloud services represents a new way of operating, and will require a change in mindset by enterprise IT leaders because ‘IT as a Service’ introduces very different business and operational models.

The report suggests that in the short term, most companies will be able to cope with growing data demands using their existing infrastructure. However as enterprises are confronted by the priority to upgrade or migrate to Private Cloud to secure greater business agility plus continued strong growth in data volumes will mean that data centres will be the principal beneficiary of the migration, with space doubling from its current level over the next five years.

“The signs are that a complex and interesting market structure will evolve over time,” commented Marion Howard Healy, the report author and a Senior Consultant at BroadGroup.  “A significantly higher proportion of enterprise data centre space will be outsourced by 2015.  In our view this could be as much as 35% by 2015.”

BroadGroup believes that Hybrid clouds will evolve as the next big opportunity and that by 2020, for the majority of enterprises, as little as 10% of applications will remain in private clouds. These applications will be core or critical to the business. Non-critical applications will be provisioned via public cloud services or via virtual private clouds on public service infrastructures. There will be exceptions particularly in finance and central government sectors.

The report represents the most comprehensive assessment yet of how Private Cloud will interact with enterprises and data centre outsourcing. Because cloud market development is “kaleidoscopic” there is much in play, and much to play for in short and medium term investment and IT decisions.

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For more information, please contact:
Kirsty Marshall/Anil Haji
VP Communications
T: +44(0)208 964 0260
E: kirsty@vp-pr.com

About BroadGroup
BroadGroup is an IT and telecommunications specialist delivering newsletters, portals, reports, studies, conferences and management consulting to the sector. BroadGroup operates internationally and has a growing presence in the Middle East and Asia markets.

About the Author
Marion Howard-Healy is a senior consultant who has analysed market demand, change and business opportunities in the European communications sector since 1983. Marion has conducted single client assignments for leading operators and vendors in Europe, USA and Australia. She has designed and managed international research programmes and carried out in-depth interviews with senior IT and Business executives in over 400 organisations, as well SMEs in many sectors.

With BroadGroup, Marion has undertaken a number of projects assessing such issues as demand for UK data centres, the rationale and implications of power based pricing, the need and impact of green data centres, dark fibre deployment in the UK, and local demand and connectivity in specific UK data centre locations. She has also recently spoken at several BroadGroup events, and is a very experienced and well regarded conference presenter.

Prior to the formation of BroadGroup, Marion worked with several of the BroadGroup management team as Director, Billing & CRM at Tarifica – PBI UK Ltd.