EMC World 2012: Europe is playing catch up in the cloud

The US and emerging markets are leaving Europe for dust when it comes to cloud adoption, thanks in part to the ongoing economic uncertainty within the Eurozone.

This was the view put forward by a panel of EMC senior executives at the storage giant's annual partner and customer summit in Las Vegas yesterday.

Cloud is mainly a US-centric as the level of digitisation in the country is far bigger than any other.

During the session, aimed at the service provider community, attendees were warned that if they failed to respond to end user demands for cloud services, they would see their businesses shrink.

Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president of EMC's service provider programme, explained: "A couple of years ago, as we approached our customers, they started to say to us on a workload-by-workload basis, I think I want to rent this now.'

"When they say that to you, you only really have one of three choices: you can become a service provider, resell a service provider's [offerings] or shrink."

Companies that decide not to partner with, or transform into, service providers will swiftly find themselves in the "shrink" category, claimed Hoffman, simply because customers want cloud.

"This doesn't seem like a trend we can put our fingers in our ears, say la la la' and [pretend] this isn't going to happen," he added.

That being said, across the globe, some regions are showing more interest in cloud than others.

However, Riccardo Di Blasio, senior vice president of certified sales and strategic alliances in the Americas, said, as time goes on, this should level out.

"At the moment, [cloud] is mainly a US-centric market. [The reasons for that are] the level of digitisation in the country is far bigger than any other. And, let's face it, technology is still a US-based sector. The majority of technology innovation [that happens in the world] comes from the US," he said.

Di Blasio then claimed the emerging economies are biting at America's heels when it comes to cloud adoption, but Europe has a lot of catching up to do.

"The problem we see in Europe with public and private cloud adoption is regulation," he explained. "We see, with the economy today, it is also very difficult to drive change."

The downturn in public sector spending in many European countries was also cited as contributing factor.

In the US, initiatives like the government's "Cloud First" programme are ensuring that the public sector is quickly becoming the largest adopter of cloud, said Di Blasio.

The scheme states that all new public sector IT projects must be cloud-based, unless there is some kind of overriding requirement to keep certain workloads on-premise.

"Europe will catch up, and when it does, the public sector will be one of the largest adopters," added Di Blasio.