The cloud delivery model has progressed from the state of "what" where CIOs deliberate on which services to adapt, to a "how" phase of choosing public, private or hybrid clouds, said Del Prete.

Del Prete predicts that the private cloud will be the near-term cloud strategy for CIOs over the next two years. Numbers from IDC's Cloud Computing Survey, conducted in December 2010, indicated that IT budgets allocated to private cloud services will rise from 24 per cent to 34 per cent. In comparison, the public cloud will only increase by two per cent from 11 per cent.

The field of analytics will become more sophisticated. Del Prete expects industry-specific and line of business analytic applications to gain more traction, while best practices from one industry will be adapted to suit other industries.

Thanks to the growing demands of "Big Data", there will be a convergence of search, text analytics and SQL data warehousing. Business analytics appliances will incorporate database and user-facing BI tools or analytic applications.

Customers will continue to demand and prefer software that is easy to acquire, install, use, and maintain, driven by cloud computing model's focus on simplicity, as well as an increasing buying influence of business users, added Del Prete.