While “software-defined everything” is currently demanding a lot of attention, the journey to the cloud is still a dominant mega-trend.

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman explains that cloud computing is still in its early days, though it’s been greatly talked about for over five years.

“It is by no means, kind of a steady state market.  There’s logic turn going on, lots of changes, lots of players coming into the market, lots of companies radically changing their environment, and  most enterprises have some play in the cloud.  But it’s definitely [the] early, early days still despite the fact that we’ve been talking about it for over five years now,” Miniman explained.

He goes on to explain that as cloud computing is still the buzz, vendors are now refocusing with their infrastructures.  Right now, Amazon is the leader in cloud computing and it’s slowly making its way to the enterprise, with Rackspace, Microsoft, IBM and EMC not far behind with their cloud environments.

With the never-ending influx of startups into the cloud marketplace, the sector seems immature and fragmented.  But Miniman explains that these startups could fill in the gap in cloud computing environments.  They could deliver features to fill up the gap and be acquired by larger cloud players, or they could be the next big thing in cloud computing.

As for the “public vs. private vs. hybrid cloud” debate, Miniman states that the industry has moved passed that and are more focused on how cloud is being used, deployed, and the availability of solutions and services.

Stu states that he and his team at Wikibon believe that “companies have to be looking at cloud environments.  Turn the clock back to those early days, five years ago in 2008, when IT had significant pressures on being able to take that fixed IT cost and change that to a flexible model.  Moving today, it’s more about business agility and be able to deploy things faster.  CIOs today, it’s not if they should be using cloud environments, it’s imperative that they do this or they will be left behind with what competitors are doing.”

For more of Miniman’s Breaking Analysis, check out the NewsDesk video below: