State of the Cloud's Real Story Isn't About Who is Winning

Released just a couple days ago, RightScale's 2015 version of its State of the Cloud Report is an interesting read. There are pieces of the report that fits perfectly with assumptions. AWS continues to lead while Microsoft continues to creep forward. Google and VMware are behind in popularity, while Cloud adoption is growing. If you watch the industry long enough, you could probably write your own accurate report pretty.

But, viewed from a different angle, there's quite a different story that is forming, and one I think is more interesting to watch.

In the report, stats show the top tier is what we expected. AWS and Azure top the list of Enterprise Public Cloud usage.

But, take a look again. What's not expected is that Rackspace has a growth lead over Google, VMware, IBM, and HP. And, not just that, but even with Google nipping at its heels, Rackspace is continuing to see increased adoption of its services. This is due in no small part, I believe, to a partnership between Rackspace and Microsoft for the Hybrid Cloud. Rackspace is surviving in the midst of giants. That says something about the company, its vision, and its ability to execute.

But, there's an even bigger story brewing, and that is found at the very bottom of the stack. IBM has made significant publicly stated investments in the Cloud over the past couple years, but finds itself with only small improvements in standing from 2014 to 2015. And, even worse, HP, which has dedicated its internal resources to revamping its Cloud story, lost significant ground in single year and remains in dead last. The fight for dead last could result in more acquisitions. Who would be first to acquire VMware? HP or IBM? VMware vCloud Air has seen a significant drop in usage and seems right for the picking.

One other note of interest from the report, one that shows VMware does have acquisition appeal and one that Microsoft should take note of, is the stats for the Private Cloud. It's obvious that Microsoft's intent is to push customers to a Public or Hybrid Cloud model, but it could be doing so at the expense of its current customers. According to other reports, companies are not moving to a completely hosted model anytime soon and will be nursing internal datacenters for several years to come. Shown in the following stat lines, VMware continues to lead the Private datacenter by a wide margin, while Microsoft is falling steadily behind. Maybe Microsoft cares less about this stat these days, but I'm sure there are those in the organization that this continues to cause nightmares.

Get your own copy of the report after a brief sign-up: RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report