The decline in cloud pricing reflects in part the intense competition between public cloud computing providers, and also the rapid product innovation that is taking place among the key worldwide platform providers.
The market for cloud computing products remains dominated by AWS which has a quarter of the IaaS segment, followed by Microsoft Azure. AWS has a record of consistent product innovation with over 500 product features launched since 2008, and continues to provide new services, including a recently announced cloud service to support the Internet of Things (IoT).
TCL calculates that the average entry-level cloud computing Instance is now at USD $0.12 per hour (based on Windows OS). The range of pricing available has narrowed over the past 2 year period, as cloud computing providers such as Rackspace Hosting and others have reduced their rates towards the levels charged by the global cloud providers - such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google.
TCL’s research finds that the reduction in pricing continue to drive cloud adoption. Cloud services are now being used by enterprises across a range of their critical applications. Although enterprise cloud adoption differs significantly by country – according to a Eurostat survey of the EU-28 countries published in 2015 for example, Italian businesses have a cloud penetration rate of 40 per cent, but German businesses by contrast have a reported cloud penetration rate of 12 per cent.
The cost of introducing private cloud services is also falling, which is encouraging the large enterprise to adopt a hybrid cloud infrastructure. TCL has also identified a key trend for Data Centre companies, IT Integrators and some Telecom Providers to become the integrator of multiple cloud services – with BT Global Services for example positioning itself as the chosen integrator of the “cloud of clouds” for large businesses.
BT is following the lead of the IT Integrator – including professional service firms CSC and Accenture – who are also partnering with leading cloud providers, particularly AWS, in order to provide cloud migration services and hybrid secure clouds for large enterprises rather than develop their own competing public cloud services.
Into 2016 the cost of the public cloud appears to have reached a price point which is now relatively stable. For example, both AWS and Microsoft are offering a similar entry level Compute Instance, with other cloud providers following with similar pricing. In the 2014 cloud survey, TCL found that both companies were offering free initial tier Compute Instances, but more recent cloud pricing has become more rational with free pricing limited to a one month or three month promotional period.
The emphasis by the cloud computing provider is now increasingly on service innovation, not price. The global cloud platform providers (including AWS, Microsoft & Google) now offer a wide range of Compute Instances suitable for intensive computing, memory, content and fast I/O applications. Cloud providers are introducing analytical services available for cloud computing applications and are now offering cloud for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).
New cloud services are being introduced to cater for specialized customer requirements as a means of avoiding price commoditization. However, the market share and computing power of AWS gives the company a considerable advantage in providing economies of scale which are passed on to the end user, with a claimed reduction in AWS cloud pricing made on 50 separate occasions since launch in 2008 – on average once a quarter over a 7 year period.
TCL forecasts that average public cloud pricing will fall by some 14 per cent over the four year period from 2016 to 2020 – but with less intense price competition over the period.
TCL also anticipates that revenues for public cloud services will increase rapidly over the same period by more than three times to some USD $82 billion.
