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Dear cloud, what's coming up next?

The cloud is here and nobody will be able to stop this trend! So what’s going on within the cloud?

At first all kind of applications we are still using locally will find the way into a SaaS application. But we still need local mobile apps in situations when we do not have an internet connection. That means that our data will not be fully mobile and a copy of all the things we are working on is stored locally and synchronized when we have an internet connection.

Next, for me a big future trend is an extended PaaS like Development-as-a-Service, where everything is stored and developed in the cloud. There are some solutions yet, but we still need a more and better integrated stack. What I mean is a combination of SaaS plus PaaS, a powerfull solution which implements the whole stack including the image of a company. Just call it „Company Service Broker“. This is for example a broker who is putting the services a company needs together e.g. ERP and CMS. So you do not need one account for each service you have to authorized with. It’s one platform which integrates everything into one application/ frontend with a single sign on for the enduser.

For me it’s inconvenient to work with more than one application. I always have to open up to 5+ browser windows and authorized for each service. So we have the same situation we know from on premise solutions – isolated applications for each problem. One solution for CMS, one for ERP etc. As an example for SaaS: GMail and Salesforce plus other applications. Honestly the integration between Salesforce and Google Apps is not well-engineered so far.

Bottom line: there is a need for one (cloud) interface to the customer.

Image sources: http://www.freshcharacters.com, http://notetoself.us,

By Rene Buest

Rene Buest is Gartner Analyst covering Infrastructure Services & Digital Operations. Prior to that he was Director of Technology Research at Arago, Senior Analyst and Cloud Practice Lead at Crisp Research, Principal Analyst at New Age Disruption and member of the worldwide Gigaom Research Analyst Network. Rene is considered as top cloud computing analyst in Germany and one of the worldwide top analysts in this area. In addition, he is one of the world’s top cloud computing influencers and belongs to the top 100 cloud computing experts on Twitter and Google+. Since the mid-90s he is focused on the strategic use of information technology in businesses and the IT impact on our society as well as disruptive technologies.

Rene Buest is the author of numerous professional technology articles. He regularly writes for well-known IT publications like Computerwoche, CIO Magazin, LANline as well as Silicon.de and is cited in German and international media – including New York Times, Forbes Magazin, Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Wirtschaftswoche, Computerwoche, CIO, Manager Magazin and Harvard Business Manager. Furthermore Rene Buest is speaker and participant of experts rounds. He is founder of CloudUser.de and writes about cloud computing, IT infrastructure, technologies, management and strategies. He holds a diploma in computer engineering from the Hochschule Bremen (Dipl.-Informatiker (FH)) as well as a M.Sc. in IT-Management and Information Systems from the FHDW Paderborn.

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