I have just returned from a week in the United Kingdom meeting Sonian customers and business partners. The purpose of the trip was to expand Sonian relationships, but an added benefit was the opportunity to glean perspectives and adoption attitudes toward cloud computing in the greater EU market. Sonian is in a unique position to observe cloud adoption trends since our SaaS service is powered by true cloud computing infrastructures, and the conversations with EU business and technology leaders revealed their true thoughts about the state of cloud computing and indicators on adoption curves in 2012, and beyond.

The Buying Market

The EU market is not one single cohesive market, but rather smaller subsets that share some ideas, and diverge on others. UK and Ireland are (as you would expect) similarly aligned, and appear to share more in common with the Scandinavian countries, than with Germany and France, which have their own country-centric view of the cloud. The French language institute can’t even come to agreement on what to call “cloud computing” in France, settling on ”informatique en nuage” as a placeholder, but still searching for a unique French term that doesn’t break their rules on language purity and consistency (other examples: Software development is called “software addition” and the people that create software are called “software editors” since they literally “edit” source code files.) From my observations, the UK, Ireland and Scandinavian countries share more in common with the US thinking about the cloud, compared to Germany, France, Italy and Spain, which diverge on a number of key issues around data locality.

The total addressable information technology market in EU is roughly equal to that of the US. Except instead of a single national set of business rules, the EU market is fractured into separate countries, languages, tax systems and local business customs. This separation dramatically reduces the business efficiencies of technology providers attempting to service the EU community. The cloud could be seen as an antidote to inefficiency. Imagine an “EU Cloud” operating in a locality that pleases all consumers, and is the trusted provider. But it feels like a stretch goal to expect a single EU cloud to be accepted with the current barriers to a cohesive EU business strategy.

The Role of Government

The role of government in EU countries is more pronounced than we see in the United States, but there is no evidence yet that EU governments are pushing cloud computing as generic trend onto the private sector. Just recently the UK government established their “G.Cloud” initiative which looks similar to the US government’s “Cloud.gov” and Data.gov initiatives. This trend could be described as a “lead by example” scenario, with central government adopting cloud computing as proof it’s safe, cost effective and viable for the private sector. A myriad of data handling regulations seek to enforce “privacy” and “resiliency” to ensure citizens are protected from un-authorized access to personal information.

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