Cloud computing is only a dozen years old, at least in its modern sense, but as software eats the world, there’s little doubt anymore that it’s the blazing center of information technology.

Think about it: Sure, you love your iPhone, but it’s a slick little brick without thousands of apps to run on it. And those apps pretty much run in the cloud, hosted by the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, Google Cloud and others. Ditto for everything we do on social media, every email and text we send, every question we ask Alexa.

And now the cloud is sweeping across businesses, turning countless corporate data centers dark while cloud giants spend billions of dollars to light up new ones of their own. It’s also anointing new kings of IT such as AWS, revitalizing some traditional providers such as Microsoft and providing glimmers of hope for legacy giants such as SAP SE and IBM Corp. At the same time, it’s leaving others such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. struggling for relevance and forcing still others such as Dell Technologies Inc. to spend big to consolidate their positions.

More than ever, too, cloud computing is not a game for dilettantes. The big cloud providers are really big and getting bigger. According to Forrester Research, AWS, Microsoft and Google will own 76 percent of cloud platform revenue this year, growing to 80 percent by 2020.

For all that, the cloud is only getting started: Cloud computing revenue, which Gartner Inc. estimates will jump 21 percent, to $186 billion this year, is still only a tiny portion of overall IT spending of $3.7 trillion this year. Yet it’s driving everything. Gartner reckons that by 2020, executives at many companies — more than 30 percent of large enterprises, in fact — will have to justify why any new IT initiatives don’t involve a cloud-only strategy. And by 2021, more than half of global enterprises worldwide that are currently using cloud computing will go all-in on it.

All this is about much more than simply lifting and shifting traditional hardware and software to the cloud. As massive a move as that is and as lucrative as it is for a few players such as Amazon, the rise of the cloud is just setting the table for a much broader transformation and redefinition of computing. That’s the story SiliconANGLE aims to tell with this Cloud Special Report.

We dig deep into the sweeping trend to serverless computing, which is allowing more companies to bypass laborious provisioning of servers and storage in the cloud to create applications faster and vastly reduce the cost of cloud computing. As AWS’ serverless chief Tim Wagner notes in an interview, it all points to companies ultimately abstracting away IT and just getting work done.

In the process, this easier way of harnessing IT is democratizing all kinds of technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. In turn, that’s enabling more and better language translation, voice recognition, image identification and more. Newfangled services such as self-driving cars, which might not look anything like IT spending as we know it, are inexorably transforming even automakers, those bastions of the Industrial Age, into software and, yes, cloud companies.

Not least, we’re continuing to analyze the competitive dynamics of the fast-changing industry — in particular this week at Google’s Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, where SiliconANGLE and its livestreaming studio theCUBE will be reporting on new technologies, interviewing key figures creating the future of cloud computing and analyzing the countless partnerships and shifting alliances. Most of all, we’re looking to illuminate continuing innovation and discover new trends that will continue to disrupt and reinvent our digital world.

Image: Ronnie Robertson/Flickr