Upcoming Gigaom Event: How good were Werner Vogels’ cloud predictions in 2012?

Werner Vogels at Structure 2014

Werner Vogels, CTO and VP at Amazon Web Services, has been a featured guest at Gigaom’s Structure conference for the last eight years.  Way back in 2012, Vogels made a few predictions on how the cloud industry would develop into 2017. Before he takes the stage this year, we thought we’d take a look at how his predictions have evolved at the halfway point.

Among Vogels’ predictions were that AWS would continue to cut prices, which is held true for much of 2013 as AWS neared it’s 50th price drop. Yet with no price cut announcements at 2014’s AWS re:Invent, it’s evident the cloud war has shifted focus to instead providing a rich array of cloud features to combat incursions by other major public cloud players, like Google and Microsoft.

In 2012, Vogels saw the rise of Pinterest and Instagram as evidence of a new flock of young business building companies on the cloud. The price of infrastructure no longer precludes small businesses access and those that do experience faster growth. Airbnb recently pass the 30M customer mark, edging out HomeAway and Priceline while Tinder averages a billion swipes a day and Uber experienced a  750% growth rate since 2009.

He also foresaw that CIOs would seek advice from younger, more agile companies with regards to IT solutions. That same year, Marissa Meyer headed to Yahoo! becoming youngest woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, showing firsthand how stalling companies sought fresh perspectives in order to remain competitive. Perhaps what Vogels didn’t foresee was the slew of acquisitions by legacy IT vendors struggling to make headway in the cloud: HP absorbed the technology and talent from Eucalyptus, Google from Nest, and Apple from Beats, Facebook from WhatsApp and more.

And lastly, Vogels believed hardware companies will have to fight tooth and nail to remain relevant. IBM was one such company fighting for relevancy with its 2013 acquisition of SoftLayer. It is yet to be seen whether IBM will continue to  see further success with ITS cloud portfolio without (now) former SoftLayer CEO, Lance Crosby.

This June, Vogels will take the Structure stage again to discuss these trends and perhaps make a few more predictions for the state of the cloud. Register early and save big.

–Clare Ryan, VP of Events, Gigaom

 

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