While hyperscale providers have grown rapidly, in part due to enterprises migrating their IT to the public cloud, non-hyperscale providers continue to offer something unique, according to an Everest Group report.
According to the report, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure will capture a greater share of enterprise IT spending, with compound growth rates of 24 percent. However, these customers want to avoid being tied to a single provider and want to experiment with the unique pricing models that smaller players can offer – if only to maintain control over their own private clouds and traditional infrastructure.
Private cloud remains important
“More than 90% of enterprises already use one or more public clouds in their enterprise environment,” the report states, adding that “Covid-19 accelerated enterprise migration to the public cloud, with the majority of enterprises benefiting from business continuity during the pandemic.”
While hyperscalers now intend to dominate enterprise IT spending, the report notes that they may need to diversify their offerings beyond full-stack cloud to include AI and machine learning. Additionally, they are diversifying their offerings beyond their traditional monolithic ones to include financial and technical support, as well as enterprise training.
Despite this, non-hyperscalers retain some leverage, as enterprises continue to leverage private cloud, multicloud, and traditional infrastructure.
According to Everest, the smaller fish can offer more customised pricing and deployment options, including on-premise. They’ve learned from hyperscalers that “as-a-service” options are popular and are now offering “local cloud” to convince more hesitant enterprises to adopt a cloud-based solution.
Additionally, Everest suggests that some of these providers are developing products in response to customer demand: “Infrastructure vendors are bringing in innovative service offerings not to compete with cloud hyperscalers, but to demonstrate their capabilities to assist clients in building a digital business.”
Several of these innovations address gaps left by the large players’ approach: enterprise-grade security, workload-specific compute, a unified management interface, and transparent invoicing.
Additionally, they provide the consulting services necessary to get new IT systems up and running: “IT service providers have developed this skill set, whereas hyperscalers, on the other hand, have a limited understanding of the enterprise IT landscape.”
