A brief audio review of this research may be found here: http://www.sector-sovereign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/July-15-2010-Sagawa-Cloud.wma
Within a decade, we believe that the large majority of Americans will accomplish the large majority of their work and personal computing needs via “cloud” applications hosted on large distributed multi-tenant server systems and accessed over the Internet. The opportunities in applications, platform software, hardware and hosting are collectively expected to grow 20.5% over the next 5 years to $148B, beginning to crowd out traditional PC investment in the process. Many consumer cloud applications, led by search, webmail, social networking and e-tail, are already well established, with portable devices increasing their utility and significant new opportunities emerging. Enterprise adoption has begun in earnest, but will be measured, as IT management struggles with control and security concerns. The strong scale economies inherent in the cloud concept obviously favor companies able to gain critical mass and establish dominance quickly – e.g. Salesforce.com, Facebook, Google, Amazon, VMWare, Cisco, et al. We also expect M&A to be active in this area as leaders fill holes and large players without strong positions seek footholds