Substantial development and growth within the cloud market appears to be one of the hottest topics within the tech community, not to mention its involvement towards the future of big data. At the WHD 2011, Graham Crich of VMware shares his idea of cloud and its market today and foreseeable future.

Crich’s speech was so forthcoming, he pretty much covered cloud realism in all corners. There are four points that stood out from his piece. He initially touched base with cloud advocates and haters within an organization. While several others rave about the cloud space and its services, there are still who are skeptical enough to block their move to the cloud. Typically, the IT managers are the perpetrators who would push for cloud movement and veer away from the tradition hosting providers.

Another great perspective that Crich was able to bring to the table is that oppositions of moving to cloud is brought about by ignorance of what it truly is. A classic example of this scenario is Amazon and Google, being the giant public cloud service providers, which do not see it as a strategic resource. The organizational influence fell short in this case. They are quite misled by their instinct of customers not being interested in pay-as-you-go cloud resources. This may be brought about by their desire to make their service unique.

The third viewpoint talks about the need to go with partnerships with their own vendors as a way to educate their customers on benefits of moving to cloud and security requirements. VMware, famous for providing virtualization software, is a vendor that has been very open with collaborations. They fused with EMC services to give birth to the ability to deploy storage for hundreds of email exchanges.

Inevitably, when experts head to the podium, you already expect predictions of the industry and the market. And Crich’s speech bears quite a number. He sees updates and upgrades with cloud services becoming staple and incessant, businesses will enter the game, there will be tons of mergers and acquisitions, people specializing in cloud services, virtual desktop, developing countries marching towards SaaS and the rise of aggregators and cloud borkers.