Secular Cloud Computing Trends Draw Investment Spending

September 18, 2012

Cloud computing remains the main secular trend driving investment spending in technology, and it is enabling more secular trends in mobility, analytics and social computing, both in the consumer and enterprise worlds, says Deborah L. Koch, a Co-Manager at the Northern Technology Fund (NTCHX) and Senior Vice President at Northern Trust Corporation.

“You don’t really have the data or the logic of the applications stored on your computer, you’re accessing it through the Internet. What we’re seeing today is a broader adoption of that, not only by consumers to access digital content of all forms but also in the enterprise,” Koch said.

Koch’s largest holding is Google (GOOG), which she says has introduced more cloud technologies than any other vendor. GOOG‘s search-engine leadership has resulted in the company tackling difficult storage, computing and analytics problems in the enterprise and consumer side, and Koch also says the company’s open-source approach has helped its technologies become more widely adopted.

“We also think Google is very attractive because their advertising monetization engine is highly differentiated. Microsoft (MSFT) is a great example of a company that has thrown literally billions of dollars at Internet search and advertising, but Google continues to dominate that market.”