Public clouds could take decades to mature, says Gartner. Organisations should focus on private clouds in the meantime
Organisations are more likely to spend their money on investments in private clouds in the next few years despite the many benefits of public cloud infrastructures, according to analyst firm Gartner.

In a research note published today, distinguished analyst Tom Bittman argued that private cloud services would provide a stepping stone to public services, with the latter maybe taking decades to mature enough for enterprise use.

In a report by Phil Muncaster of www.V3.co.uk he discusses the findings.

But I’d like to question the assessment claim by Gartner. Decades is a long time in technology. 10 years ago a mobile phone was brick, a USB with 256K was pretty cool and the internet was pretty flaky.  10 years from now, what can we expect.  Already the most of the technology in Microsoft’s envisioning video is available – although not commercially in the market.

Plastic Logic, a client of Nimbus is launching an A4 reader as thin as paper next month.

Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google all have offerings that have massive investments behind them and they are not aimed at just the SME or consumer.  They are architected and priced so that ISVs or enterprises can run their applications in the Cloud - reliably and securely - and I am sure that their business models do not assume 10-20 years to break even.

So maybe the reference is to the maturity of enterprise clients willingness to use public Clouds.  The revenue growth of Salesforce.com in the enterprise sector and a just one of many article in the computer press  "Chief information officers are more comfortable with the idea of cloud computing than they were six months ago" ComputerWeekly suggests that enterprises will take less than decades to adopt public clouds.

So maybe the jury is out - or Gartner are predicting in 'internet-years' where a decade is the same as one earth-year.