• Fierce competition breaking out between Microsoft, Oracle and Google as they take on AWS
• 69% of enterprises will have multi-cloud/hybrid IT environments by 2019
• But the rising complexity will likely see the emergence of cloud dealers with simple, fixed-price offerings 

The cloud shows no signs of deflating according to 451 Research which has been totting up the numbers in the run-up to AWS re:invent, Amazon Web Services’ bun-fight next week. On the contrary, it says enough enterprises are now quickly moving to hybrid and multi-cloud environments for cloud to be called ‘mainstream’.

Ninety per cent of  the organizations it surveyed were found to be using some type of cloud service, but the real ‘pivot’ away from DIY owned and operated IT to some form of cloud or hosted solution is expected to be under way right now as cloudification intensifies.

A full 60 per cent of workloads are expected to be running on some sort of hosted cloud service by 2019, up from 45 per cent doing so today.

This movement will see the dollar value of the cloud market rise too. While it’s expected  to generate $28 billion this year, by 2021 cloud will be worth $53.3 billion as cloud service providers expand their offerings.

However all the crazy growth has consequences. With 69 per cent of respondents planning to have some type of multi-cloud or hybrid environment by 2019 the product or service complexity tends to grow exponentially, making optimizing and analysing cloud expenditure increasingly difficult.

451 Research says AWS alone already has over 320,000 SKUs (Stock-Keeping Units - used in inventory data management, SKUs are codes which uniquely identify a product or service) a number which is rising fast .

“Cloud buyers have access to more capabilities than ever before, but the result is greater complexity. It is a nightmare for enterprises to calculate the cost of computing using a single cloud provider, let alone comparing providers or planning a multi-cloud strategy,” said Dr. Owen Rogers, Research Director at 451 Research. “The cloud was supposed to be a simple utility like electricity, but new innovations and new pricing models, such as AWS Reserved Instances, mean the IT landscape is more complex than ever.”

Where there’s complexity and a possible looming road-block there’s always an opportunity for a new business model or two, and ‘complex cloud’ is no exception. Now that the Web Scale public cloud battle has been properly joined  with Google, Oracle and Microsoft all pricing against AWS, analysts can see a new layer of ‘cloud dealers’ forming to offer enterprises simple and low-cost offers - similar they say to how consumer energy suppliers “abstract away” the complexity of global energy markets.