Clouds today are not what clouds will be tomorrow. As the technology of clouds evolve, clouds will become more tailored to the needs of specific consumer groups, specific professional groups and specific industries and markets.
Vertical marketing of cloud technology will bring about vertical branding of clouds. Google Home is one indicator of this trend. Google Home is a cloud platform that is geared for the home, the home consumer. Saleforce.com , with the promotion of its Health Cloud, is another example of a vertical cloud marketing trend. Other cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure, IBM, HP and Rackspace will more than likely join in this trend, if they already have not.
Today though, companies, professionals, and consumers for the most part must still sort through an ocean of IT jargon to determine what cloud provider actually can fill their specific cloud computing, service and software needs. Those who are knew to cloud technology, and are not IT professionals, are forced to learn the meaning of unfamiliar terms such as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and so on and so on.
These terms baffle many and are not conducive to making sales to companies that simply want to know what the cloud means to their professional lives and business organizations. A vertical marketing approach that uses terms that are familiar to specific types of professionals and businesses, and avoids terms that are IT professional centric may well be a better way to educate target markets about the cloud and generate market interest. IT centric words, still, have their place. After all its IT departments and CIOs that actually make cloud buying decisions. As well, it is the IT staff that evaluates a cloud provider based on network metrics such as computer time, hardware allocation capability, security and optimization capabilities.
Cloud vertical marketing will open the way to a more highly competitive market. For example, there is little doubt that a biotechnology company would prefer to go to a cloud provider that focuses on biotechnology business and scientific needs than just an everyday generic cloud provider The ideal biotechnology cloud provider would specialize in high-powered genetic SaaS, databases specific to the needs of biotechnology companies, hardware configurations that are optimized for intensive genome calculations and even have PaaS specifically made for the development of biotech software. All of which would help reduce not only operating costs of biotechnology companies but reduce the cost of market entry.
The list of vertical clouds is as endless as the number of different business markets. For example, automotive clouds, agricultural clouds, transportation clouds, logistics clouds, integrated circuit clouds to name just a few possibilities. . This means that there is plenty of work for cloud providers to do. And it means that the ones that do this vertical work will end up with major market shares in specific and lucrative vertical cloud markets.
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