Personal Cloud Adoption: Steady March Towards One Billion Users by 2016

Hal Steger : Thinking Out Cloud
Hal Steger
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Funambol. 20+ years of marketing & product management experience at high-growth, innovative global software companies.
| This blog is about personal cloud solutions, technology, trends and market developments. Its scope is to comment on and discuss several aspects of personal clouds.

Personal Cloud Adoption: Steady March Towards One Billion Users by 2016

In the past few weeks, I have had the chance to discuss the personal cloud market with several of the leading mobile industry analysts.

A primary recurring question is how many people actually use a personal cloud service?

The answer depends on one's definition of the market and what actually constitutes a personal cloud service. For example, it could be argued that Facebook is a personal cloud service, as many people store photos and other content in the Facebook cloud.

I'll leave the question of market definition for another time but in these discussions, the analysts and I reviewed the following forecast that shows how there will be one billion users of personal cloud services by 2016 (not including Facebook users).

Personal Cloud User Adoption Forecast

After vetting this with the analysts, including some of them performing their own independent research, pretty much all agreed that the forecast was accurate or even understated the number of people that would be using personal cloud services within a few years.

The drivers for this are several but the primary one is that more people are using multiple mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, as well as personal computers, and they increasingly need a way to back up all of these devices and to easily access their data and content across all of them.

From our view, the market is unfolding as follows. iCloud was the first major commercial personal cloud service that successfully popularized the concept of the personal cloud for mobile consumers. There were other personal cloud services before iCloud but because Apple built iCloud into all of their iPhones and iPads, and made a strategic commitment to advertising and promoting iCloud, the concept of the cloud has become somewhat familiar to mass market users.

Beyond iCloud, there have been several important personal cloud services introduced, including Dropbox, SkyDrive and several based on Funambol. Collectively, there are currently about 400M users of all of these services.

The next major phase in the market will come when large mobile operators preload the next generation of personal cloud services on their handsets, or bundle their services with their mobile plans. Some of these operators have hundreds of millions of users. In some places, the percentage of users with smartphones exceeds 50%, and within a couple of years, during the next device upgrade opportunity, many people who don't have a smartphone will get one. The next major stage of the market will be driven by these 'operator clouds', culminating in the steady march to one billion personal cloud users by 2016 (or maybe sooner).

By the way, our company just released a brief new YouTube video of our personal cloud service. If you are new to personal clouds, here's a good way to understand what they are about:

http://youtu.be/73QWWYp2icI

What do you think, will there be one billion personal cloud users by 2016?