A major study into cloud has given IBM the thumbs up.

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The report, released this week by Longhaus, selects IBM as the top infrastructure-as-a-service Cloud for enterprise in Australia, citing its flexible billing options and low commitment formula.

“IBM’s smart Cloud enterprise is established in six Cloud data centres globally, including two onshore Australian centres, enabling clients to run workloads across any centre of choice,” said Longhaus MD, Peter Carr.

IBM’s cloud came ahead of rivals Wipro, Datacom, Emantra and Fujitsu who were also among the top 5 providers here, among 175 companies globally currently offering service to the Oz market.

No. 2 Whipro “will be a surprise to many,” Longhaus conceded but “while Wipro’s in-country marketing is no indicator of cloud capability, they are highly resourced and will be a new leader to watch in the ‘API Economy’.”

Area9, a Darwin based cloud enterprise was also given the nod for ‘Rising Star’ and although it is predominant in Northern Australia, it could soon extend its capabilities into South East Asia, Carr noted.

The cloud market is now hitting maturity the report also stated, with over one third of providers experiencing outages in the last 12 months.

Key emerging cloud trends include: ‘Business-as-a-Service’, where, for example, an airline pays their cloud provider on a per-suitcase processed through the entire baggage handling systems.

 “This is game-changing and takes the challenge of consumption-based pricing to a whole new level,” says Longhaus senior research director, Scott Stewart.

Another trend emerging is “a whole new market where pure-play IaaS providers such as Amazon are enabling a massive pool of non-cloud professional services companies including KPMG, Accenture and Deloitte to now deliver cloud services.”

This will add a completely new dimension to the category and place challenges on the current cloud leaders, Stewart warns.
 

What it means is “watch out IBM, Wipro, Fujitsu, CSC and others, your competitive landscape is rapidly shifting ground.”

Cloud API (Application Programming Interfaces) economy in its own right was another trend emerging on the cloud.