Cloud providers are running out of next big things [Video]

As cloud computing providers hit the innovation wall, enterprises need to adjust their strategies to concentrate on the tricky problems of their own businesses.

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Recent research from Gartner and IDC paints a sobering picture: Cloud providers are experiencing diminishing returns on their innovation investments. Cloud spending continues to grow, but industry analysts note that the pace of revolutionary new services has significantly slowed.

Remember when cloud providers were dropping game-changing innovations every few months? Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revolutionized our thoughts about computing resources. Serverless computing eliminated entire categories of operational overhead. Container orchestration transformed application architecture. Those were the glory days of cloud innovation.

Innovation is getting thin

Strip away the AI hype and look at the recent announcements from AWS re:Invent, Microsoft Ignite, or Google Cloud Next. Most improvements are incremental: better VM performance, minor serverless enhancements, and slightly more efficient container management. It’s evolution, not revolution.

But Dave, what about AI? Surely AI has supplied a …