A series of reports published today by Ovum suggest that 2013 will see cloud computing continue to grow rapidly as it tackles the IT challenges of reducing costs and boosting innovation.

In the 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing report, Laurent Lachal, senior analyst, Ovum Software notes: “It takes a lot of effort from vendors and enterprises to actually make it work, and they will succeed in making it work in 2013, both on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems.”

Indeed, cloud computing in all its guises (public, private, and hybrid) is building momentum, evolving fast and becoming increasingly “enterprise-grade”. Yet, it is early days for vendors and enterprises.

“Cloud computing has barely reached the adolescence phase and it will take at least another five years for cloud computing to mature," says Lachal.

2013 will also see the emergence of cloud computing ecosystem. Public clouds are increasingly approached not only as technology delivery platforms but also as “ecosystem hubs” for cloud service providers and consumers.

Lachal comments: “They offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile solution ecosystems of the Internet age. Some industry sectors are benefiting from the “data centre as a hub”, an increasingly cloud computing-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data centre such as around financial exchanges, web and online services, or media content.”

Cloud computing services, and the (social, mobile) applications that cloud platforms underpin, generate a lot of data, which in turn requires cloud services and applications to make sense of it.

This trend connects with and fuels other industry trends such as the Internet of things (machine-to-machine communication and data processing, cloud computing-based smart cities, TVs or cars projects), open government data, consumerisation of IT (with a variety of cross-device content-centric public clouds, such as the one provided by Apple), and, last but not least, 'big data'.

The market’s attention, under the ‘big data’ banner, is currently mostly focused on technology issues, but from 2013 onward from a cloud computing perspective there will be growing interest in the cultural shift required by vendors and enterprises to turn data into a resource to manage and monetise, starting with data abstraction (from underlying IT systems), sharing (within and outside the enterprise), and valuation.

“Some vendors played the cloud data card early, but the cloud data production, brokerage, and consumption ecosystem is still in the making and will continue to evolve over the next five years,” concludes Lachal.

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