Today’s cloud computing is very much like the office rental business long time ago. At that time, the office rental business got started and offered an option to these companies who had to build their own office buildings. Some people, especially the investors, might have asked, “Will all the companies rent offices rather than building their own in the future?” This is a very similar question as we ask, “Will all the companies rent data centers rather than building their own in the future?”

Let’s look at the “future” of the office rental. As we can find today, most SMB businesses rent office instead of building their own; most big companies own their offices. In fact, it’s mixed for big companies. They own some of the office buildings, and rent the rest. The criteria to build or rent is not capital investment, but how long it needs the space. The longer it needs it, the more likely it builds or buys its own.

So we can predict the future of cloud computing very much the same as today of office rental. Most SMB will use cloud service providers. Most big companies will continue to build and own their datacenters and infrastructure, but will leverage the cloud services on some short term projects.