Cloud computing will be one of three major trends in the IT services space for 2010, along with mobile computing, and offshoring and outsourcing, according to Global Equities Research Co-founder Trip Chowdhry. The thread connecting all three of these initiatives is simple: the Internet.

“The underlying building block is going to be Internet. When I talk about Internet, it means universal access from any device, anywhere, anytime, always on, always available,” Chowdhry said. “That is the difference in 2010, I would say, between the next decade and the prior decade.”

The analyst’s forecasts also include a new segmentation of the IT services market, which he says will develop a “consumer-centric” model and an “enterprise-centric” model, feeding into another 2010 trend: the consumerization of the enterprise.

“What [this] means is the best technologies, the best products, the best innovations that are happening in the consumer side of the technology would find their way into the enterprise. For example, technology similar to social networking will emerge into what they will call an ‘enterprise networking’ or ‘enterprise partner management,’” said Chowdhry, who also cites Twitter as another technology that will be used to manage enterprise knowledge. “And then technologies like smartphones will find their way into the enterprise. So there will be a very exciting time in 2010, but the players will be different.”

Who will be at the forefront of this movement? For the cloud application delivery, Chowdhry cites Google (GOOG), VMware (VMW), Salesforce.com (CRM) and Microsoft (MSFT) as the probably leaders. Meanwhile, Sybase (SY) will most likely lead the mobile enterprise subcategory.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 11:03 am and is filed under General Investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.