Cloud: Top 100 Influencers and Brands for 2016

Cloud storage is the solution to the ever increasing demand for accessing data anywhere, from any device. In 2015 we uncovered the top 100 cloud influencers and brands in our blog, and we were keen to revisit the topic to see how the list has changed since then. The industry has grown considerably over the past year, the cloud IT Infrastructure Market was forecast to grow to $32.6 billion in 2015, driven by public cloud data centre expansion. This trend does not seem to be slowing any time soon, according to IDC cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a rate of 15.1% a year, and will reach $53.1 billion by 2019.

Cloud is becoming an integral part of the day to day lives of businesses and households across the globe, as it allows for a more accessible, efficient, and flexible form of data storage. The business environment of the future requires swift and secure access of data from anywhere in the world, and the cloud is the most effective method.

WHAT ARE THE EXPERTS SAYING?

We reached out to some of the top 20 influencers to ask them for their views on Cloud. We spoke to Ian Moyse (#1), Jim Harris (#3), Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré (#4) Holger Mueller (#8), Bob Evans (#13), David Skok (#14) and Bill Kleyman (#16). Be sure to follow them to stay up to date on the best content and resources on Cloud!

Ian Moyse – Board Member Eurocloud (UK), FAST & Governance Board Member Cloud Industry Forum

“Cloud has been hyped for many years now, but as we enter 2016 it is moving from ‘Hype to Ripe’ and the accelerator is firmly down in businesses small to large both in the private and public sectors.  We are moving past the man with the red flag walking as a warning in front of the car, to the point where even if people don’t have a car they have been in one or know someone who has! We are into the period of acceptance, still with some nervousness around security and data governance, but a stage where the gain outweighs any perceived pain. Through the increased proof points of successful cloud projects, the growth of CxO’s having cloud transformation strategies, proliferation of mobile and the entrant of IOT, cloud’s accelerated growth stage has come to fruition. Through this we see an aligned acceleration of information sharing on social and people looking for thought leaders and information sharers to help educate their way into the cloudy new world we all live in.”

Jim Harris – International Best Selling Author on Disruptive Innovation

“Cloud computing is profoundly transforming IT organizations and society as a whole. Most people think of products when they think of innovation. Products, however, deliver only 15% of the value to the market. It is business model innovation, enabled almost exclusively by cloud computing, that has delivered the other disruptive and value-laden 85%.”

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré – Chief Strategy Officer at Inturact

“Our world is moving to a subscription-based economy, and this means that industries are transforming their business models to embrace the subscription economy. Because of this economy, relationships are becoming more important as businesses are required to build long-term relationships with their customers. These relationships are validated every month as customers renew their subscriptions. And because it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain them, making customers successful is the most strategic approach to business growth in the new economy.”

Holger Mueller – VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research

“We live in exciting times where technology capability has surpassed the demands of business best practices, resulting in a void for 21st century business best practices and enabling new business models. The investment shift from enterprises to cloud service providers is a key enabler for next generation applications enabling these new best practices and business models… it also is the most fundamental change to the IT function since its inception in the 50ies of last century.”

Bob Evans – Chief Communications Officer at Oracle

“In today’s social/mobile world, businesses have to move at the speed of their customers—and cloud computing’s the only way to achieve that. In today’s digital world, companies have to recruit, hire, and retain world-class talent—and cloud computing’s the only way to accomplish that. In today’s consumer-driven global economy, businesses have to engage with customers on the customers’ terms and must dazzle every step of the way—and cloud computing’s the only way to do that. Cloud computing gives businesses the gifts of speed and innovation, and relieves them of the crushing financial burden of having to integrate hundreds or thousands of disparate IT components. In short, cloud computing is simply indispensable in today’s world of digital business.”

David Skok – General Partner at Matrix Partners

“We’re still in the early stages of a massive shift to cloud computing where applications, development and infrastructure are moving off-premises to a cloud model (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). This shift is creating major new companies such as Workday, Zendesk, HubSpot, Shopify, etc. that will become the software leaders of tomorrow. This shift is not just changing delivery method, it is fundamentally changing what software is made and for whom it is available. For example, with easier implementation and lower risk, new customer types such as small and medium sized business become important new customers for a wide variety of software. Also, the information that was previously inaccessible due to silo-ed on-premise applications will finally become easy to access and integrate using public SaaS API’s.  With all these changes, it’s no wonder the communities on twitter, in the blogosphere and elsewhere are coming together – there is a lot to share and learn.”

Bill Kleyman – Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at MTM Technologies

“Between now and 2020, we’re going to be experiencing a very real digital revolution. Users, business, and even entire cities are becoming digital entities. Throughout all of this, cloud services will continue to change and evolve. There will be greater capabilities around rich content delivery, and next-generation support for the ever-mobile user. From a business’s perspective, new types of cloud ecosystems help create amazing data center economics and new resource consumption models. Most of all, we’ll see a boom around a new type of hybrid IT model. One that supports true user distribution, while still keeping the business agile. Cloud computing will influence more people and many more organizations moving forward; helping the vast majority create better business strategies and new competitive advantages.”

MAPPING THE COMMUNITY

We were very interested in seeing which cloud professionals and brands were leading the online discussion, so we analysed  888K+  tweets from October 13th, 2015 to January 10th, 2016 mentioning the following keywords: cloud OR cloudcomputing OR hybridcloud OR privatecloud OR publiccloud OR thecloud OR cloudstorage OR “cloud storage” OR #SaaS OR  #Iaas OR #Paas. We then identified the top 100 most influential brands and individuals leading the discussion on Twitter. What we discovered was a very engaged community, with much discussion between individuals and brands. Below you can see a network map of the online conversation created with our Influencer Relationship Management software (IRM). Be sure to click on the map to enjoy the full size network diagram in greater detail.

Below you can see another network map created with our Influencer Relationship Management software (IRM) showing the #1 Brand Oracle at the centre, and the conversations to and from the different influencers in his field. If you are interested in learning more about identifying, managing and engaging with influencers click here to get in touch!

We were also interested in seeing, out of the top cloud vendors, which brands had the largest share of voice. So we created topic in our Influencer Relationship Management software, using the same keywords and date range used to extract the tweets, to produce a pie chart illustrating the volume of posts mentioning Cloud topics:

100 INDIVIDUALS

We looked at all the individuals engaging on Twitter to bring you a list of the top 100 most influential individuals in the Cloud landscape.

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Top 100 Brands

In the top 100 brands we can find a great selection of industry heavyweights like Microsoft, IBM and Google as well as useful resources such as Cloud Blogs and Talkin’ Cloud.

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At Onalytica we love building these lists and want to give back to our loyal readers as much as we can. If you’re interested in other topics (such as Machine to Machine, Wearable Tech, Internet of Things) be sure to have a gander on our blog or why not propose some topics to us on twitter? We also build some very cool software to manage all of these influencers. Get a free demo today by clicking the button below!

Disclaimer: As ever with these lists, it must be stressed that the ranking is by no means a definitive measurement of influence, as there is no such thing. The brands and individuals listed are undoubtedly influential when it comes to driving discussion in the cloud debate.

The PageRank based methodology we use to extract influencers on a particular topic takes into account the number and quality of contextual references that a user receives. These calculations are independent of a user’s number of followers, but we do filter our lists based on how much a user is engaged in the conversation and the influence they drive through their networks.

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