Gartner: cloud will be bulk of IT spending by 2016.

• Position: CLOUD

Cloud spending is growing so fast that it will comprise the majority of new IT expenditures by 2016, according to an October press release from Gartner Inc. The IT research company further predicts that 2016 will see the private cloud give way to the hybrid cloud. By the end of the following year, Gartner expects nearly half of all large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployment, meaning the enterprise will be both a user and provider of cloud services.

David Linthicum, chief technology officer and founder of Cloud Technology Partners, disagrees with part of this prediction. "Enterprises will use a variety of cloud models, including private and hybrid, resulting in a multicloud reality rather than a hybrid one. Already, enterprises are finding the cloud deployments that meet their requirements are more complex than private, public, or hybrid," he wrote in his October 29 InfoWorld blog.

In an earlier blog, Linthicum wrote that multicloud "add[s] more clouds to the mix, perhaps two or more public IaaS [infrastructure as a service] providers, a private PaaS [platform as a service], on-demand management and security systems from public clouds, private use-based accounting ..." This is in contrast to a hybrid cloud, which he defined as "typically a paired private and public cloud."

In the more recent blog, he added that business--not IT will drive cloud growth. Those in the business who want more cost-effective ways to provide IT services, decrease time to market, and increase agility will provide the impetus. The growth will be more...