I came across a great blog called Cloud Computing’s Stormy Future this morning by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown. John and John are co-chairmen of the Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, and have written several books focused on technology and innovation. Their post talks about the disruptive potential of cloud computing and outlines four distinctive, overlapping waves. Following is a brief summarization:
1st Wave – New ways of deliverying IT to enterprises that will be challenging for traditional enterprise IT firms to embrace.
2nd Wave – New IT architectures designed to address unmet needs
3rd Wave – Restructuring the tech industry as vertically integrated cloud service providers begin to focus on different layers of the technology stack
4th Wave – Companies harness cloud computing to disrupt an array of industries with fundamentally new value propositions. Healthcare is one of the industries they name as having a bulls eye for disruption related to cloud computing.
John and John state that all four of these waves have already started to play out.
Do yourself a favor and read their entire post and for more detail on the disruptive waves of cloud computing check out their working paper, “Storms on the Horizon.”