Top 3 Predictions for Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms in 2022

As vendors embrace open, hybrid architectures, PaaS emerges as the source of differentation

Vendors adjust strategies as clients ask for open and flexible IT

Customer demand for more open, cross-cloud services will shape vendor investments through 2022. Vendors traditionally known for locking customers in to their technology, including IaaS incumbent Amazon Web Services (AWS), will likely re-evaluate their portfolios and go-to-market messaging in the coming year. This could have lasting impacts on peers such as IBM and Google Cloud, which use openness as a competitive differentiator. For example, this past year AWS took a big leap forward with the general availability of EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) Anywhere, which allows customers to create and manage Kubernetes clusters inside their data centers.

Along with Outposts, AWS markets EKS Anywhere as part of its hybrid portfolio, which is typically just an extension of AWS cloud services to on-premises environments. However, for many competing vendors like IBM and Google Cloud, hybrid cloud has come to mean supporting customers’ workloads not only on premises but also across competitors’ clouds. AWS could similarly go down this route to better compete and may surprise the market in 2022 by offering EKS on other public clouds. Oracle is another example of a vendor known for confining customers to its cloud stack; yet, as Oracle looks to position itself as the No. 4 cloud leader in 2022, it could slowly embrace deployment methods outside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This trend is reflected in Oracle’s newer open-source application development and management platform, which is somewhat comparable to Red Hat OpenShift, and is expected to be deployable to third-party clouds.

2022 cloud infrastructure & platforms predictions

• Hybrid remains the new norm
• Bringing cloud to the customer: Distrubuted cloud moves from experiment to niche delivery method
• IaaS is about scale; PaaS is about differentiation

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Telecom Business Research’s 2022 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud, telecom, devices, data center, and services & digital.