OakLeaf Systems: Interest in Cloud Computing Increases as Web Services and SOA Lose Google Search and News Volume

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Interest in Cloud Computing Increases as Web Services and SOA Lose Google Search and News Volume

I’ve been tracking Web search interest in “cloud computing” since Microsoft announced SQL Server Data Services (SSDS, now SQL Data Services, SDS) at MIX 08 and I started my weekly Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for Whenever posts. My admittedly unscientific technique was to periodically record Google hits for the “cloud computing” search term.

William Vambenepe’s The law of conservation of hype post of 5/8/2009 inspired me to compare Google Trends’ Search Volume index and News Reference volume for three related terms that in the past few years garnered similar hype levels: virtualization, SOA, and Web services. Here’s the Google Trends graph of the four terms for the past five+ years:

To better demonstrate that cloud computing is in the “Technology Trigger” phase of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, here’s a graph for “cloud computing” only for the past 12 months:

On May 8, 2009, a “cloud computing” Google Web search returned about 13,400,000 hits; a Google News search returned 7,775 hits.

Note: The peak at point C (late October 2008) occurred during Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 where Ray Ozzie and Amitabh Srivastava announced the Azure Services Platform in the opening keynote.

For reference, here’s a graphic example of the classic Gartner Hype Cycle:

Here’s Gartner’s view of cloud computing from its Gartner Highlights 27 Technologies in the 2008 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies press release:

Cloud computing — As companies seek to consume their IT services in the most cost-effective way, interest is growing in drawing a broad range of services (for example, computational power, storage and business applications) from the "cloud," rather than from on-premises equipment. Many types of technology providers are aligning themselves with this trend, with the result that confusion and hype will continue for at least another year before distinct submarkets and market leaders emerge.