We’re at a global inflection point in cloud computing, and a number of things — the economic environment, a new generation in the workforce, the maturing of the technology, and new collaborative networks — have all come together to say the tipping point is now.

People are looking for smart ways of delivering business services that question the need for capital expenditure. The Millennial Generation [those who were in their teens in 2000 and only know a post-Internet world] is now solidly in the workforce, and they seriously understand the value of “rent rather than buy.”

Add to that the fact that cloud technology has now reached a level of maturity — in terms of mobility, connectivity, security — as well as the whole phenomenon of collaboration and sharing, and you see things have actually changed.

You have to make a call as to when the market is reaching that turning point. And the conversations I’ve been having with my peers certainly show we’re there. Of course, they know cloud is not completely new: it has been an evolution from time-sharing in the ’80s to grid computing and server farms in the ’90s to SOA more recently.

But today we understand the implications of being able to scale services to meet demand and delivering them at a subscription price — services that work independently of location, device and operating system.

The over-hyping has come from people trying to stall cloud adoption — market incumbents, who naturally are trying to hold on to their prior profit margins or monopolies. But there are lessons they could learn elsewhere.

Take the impact of Skype, which completely shattered the international calling market. That was a classic  “innovator’s dilemma.” First, telcos said to themselves, “Don’t worry about it,” and denied its existence. Then they screamed and pointed to its inability to meet performance guidelines, even as Skype was innovating and fast improving quality. It radically improved “codecs” [the means of encoding a signal for transmission], when telcos the world over had been using the same codecs for 70 years. Now who was more supportive of the customer there?

And that is what is going to happen in the world of technology infrastructure as the cloud takes over. The enormous waste of having to buy locked-up silos of overcapacity is going to disappear. You can’t turn back the waves.

I am hardly the only person that has a real sense of a tipping point; in many areas, the debate has now gone from “Why the cloud?” for new IT to “Why not the cloud?”, so that a justification has to be made if you don’t choose a cloud service. I reckon we are five to seven years away from seeing cloud as the dominant model for 80% of IT services.

Something is happening and it certainly isn’t hype to me. At some point you have to say, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it must be a duck.

• JP Rangaswami blogs at: confusedofcalcutta.com

Do you agree with JP Rangaswami? Have your say by commenting below — and read a contrasting point of view from Ian Cohen, CIO at risk specialists Jardine Lloyd Thompson.