- Though more complex to run that standard public cloud solutions, hybrid clouds are "likely to grow as a percentage of total cloud deployments in the next two to three years" due to strong corporate interest, argues Pac Crest's Brendan Barnicle. He expects Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which has made an aggressive hybrid cloud push via Azure and its integrations with various on-premise Microsoft products, to benefit.
- While Amazon and Google overwhelmingly focus on public cloud services, Barnicle observes many enterprises are more partial to a hybrid approach in which mission-critical apps and data are kept on-premise, while other workloads are moved to public clouds. He also points out hybrid clouds enable new backup, disaster recovery, and archiving services, among others.
- In addition, Barnicle argues a server upgrade cycle resulting from Microsoft's ending of Windows Server 2003 support (set for July 14) will boost Azure demand. "We believe many of these customers will be upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2, which would allow hybrid cloud deployments. Additionally, most of the SMB customers that need to upgrade are likely to transition to a public cloud solution such as Azure."
- Rackspace, IBM, and other backers of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure platform are also betting heavily on hybrid clouds. Meanwhile, Google struck a deal last month with VMware to make several Google public cloud services available on VMware's vCloud Air hybrid cloud platform.
- Microsoft hasn't broken out Azure's revenue by itself. The company did recently announce its Commercial Cloud revenue (covers Azure, Office 365 for businesses, and other offerings) is now on a $5.5B/year run rate.