Electricity and Control April 2025

Industry 4.0 + IIoT

The global cloud ecosystem experienced significant upheaval in 2024 and 2025 is expected to bring more of the same. This is the view shared by Lee Syse, Director of Product and Go-To-Market, and Andrew Cruise, Managing Director, at Routed. More changes in the cloud ecosystem in 2025

Andrew Cruise, Routed Managing Director and Lee Syse, Director of Product and Go-to-Market (GTM).

C hanges in 2024 were driven by factors such as repatriation, sovereignty, and market consolidation. As we move forward through 2025, anticipating further shiœs, Syse says readiness, reassessment, and resilience are the watchwords for all players in the cloud ecosystem. He notes that in 2024, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware probably had the single biggest impact on the cloud ecosys tem. “This acquisition caused a major rethink across indus tries. Although Broadcom is encouraging a view of the right horse for the right course – or the right workload for the right cloud – the changes implemented in the partner market are making customers and partners think more carefully about the cloud,” he says. “And it is not only VMware customers that have had to re think their strategies and approaches. For partners, the chal lenge has been around uncertainty over contract terms, and fear over possible price increases.” Syse adds that this has led them to ask whether they will move to other vendors, and whether VMware still makes sense as a technology of choice or does the market footprint they address require that they adopt additional technologies. “What we faced in 2024 enforced a maturing of people’s un derstanding of cloud and their approach to cloud. You could say the Broadcom acquisition of VMware has shaken up the industry’s infrastructure plans; it created an inflection point in

the cloud computing and virtualisation space.”

The repatriation issue Andrew Cruise, MD at Routed, notes that there were other considera tions in focus in 2024, besides the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. There was also a shiœ back towards on-premises data management and away from hyperscale clouds. “We have seen cloud service providers, as well as end customers, resellers, service providers, OEMs, and vendors mature in their think ing about where various clouds fit in. Every global cloud vendor has its own place, as they don’t all do the same thing. “A key trend for 2024 was this realisation that certain clouds are good for certain things and other clouds are not. This was reinforced by the Broadcom acquisition and the changes that have been imple mented,” Cruise says. He explains that repatriation is mostly driven by concerns around performance and cost, with many players not getting the kind of value and eiciency out of the cloud that was expected. “At the same time, fears around who has access to your data also drive this trend. If your data is hosted with a foreign company, can you be certain of its security? Thus, a lack of trust is also a driver of the repatriation trend.”

Sovereignty and consolidation “The concern around cloud and data sovereignty is closely tied to re

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APRIL 2025 Electricity + Control

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