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Businesses seeking growth seek the next big thing. What is the “thing” that will transform the way business processes take place? And while it is not new per say, it is clear the cloud is the “thing” to keep an eye on as all the major players have taken a seat at the table, each seeking their slice of the “as-a-Service” pie.

The future is software-based, hosted in the cloud and comes in the form of offerings from 1000s of application providers and a growing number of cloud providers. Today’s dynamic content needs a network capable of providing such a broad swath of content that includes back up and sync, voice and video, online gaming, cloud services and more. This software based future is built on the backbone of the burgeoning cloud market.

IDC (News - Alert) notes 58 percent of companies plan to use web-based cloud services, doubling the number from 2014. Gartner forecasts cloud spending to reach $175 billion in 2015 and surpass $300 billion by 2019 – with $61 billion in software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)), and almost $50 billion in Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) respectively.

Today, Amazon is the clear market leader for infrastructure services with 31 percent market share, dominating IaaS. And, a couple months back AWS cut cloud prices and revealed its database migration services with sites set on the enterprise migration market. Microsoft (News - Alert) holds 10 percent market share but is climbing the cloud leader board as a result of Nadella’s cloud-focused game plan.

Google holds a sliver of the market but is showing strides. They are expected to increase data centers by a factor of five over the next year and a half. And Google Cloud could celebrate a nice victory recently in the form of Apple (News - Alert) moving business away from the market leader to Google.

Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti told USA Today, “The battle is on now to get companies to move their applications and their data... We’re the easiest place to store your core data, and once we get it, look at all the exciting tools that can offer better insights, better sales opportunities and deeper intelligence.'"  

As we delve deeper into the clouds, the future appears clearer than ever – as a service. As we sit back and enjoy the show that is the cloud wars keep in mind this is not zero-sum; there can and will be more than one winner. The cloud is transforming business, and we are still just at the tip of the iceberg.