IBM’s latest global research on cloud computing kicks out a couple of unexpected correlations.

Line of commercial decisionmakers are more thinking about cloud computing’s strategic potential than are their IT counterparts.

That was one of the most surprises in IBM’s latest global research into the cloud-computing phenomenon. The survey, released in late October, involved 800 companies in 13 countries and 24 industries.

LOB executives are embracing software-, platform-, and infrastructure-as-a-service more quickly than their IT peers, the survey found.

“Three years from now, 72% of the folks we surveyed within the line of economic believe it’ll be ‘strategically important’ to remodeling their companies,” said IBM’s VP of cloud services Ric Telford, who teased many of the research’s top-level findings during his keynote finally month’s Cloud Connect conference in Chicago.

The majority of IT leaders, some 58%, also believe in cloud’s impact, the survey found. Today, it truly is prior to LOB in this dimension, 49% to 34%.

[Need to know more about the way it views the cloud? See OpenStack Wins Developers’ Hearts, But Not IT’s Minds.]

The IBM survey segmented respondents into three groups: Chasers, Challengers, and Pacesetters.

The last group, that’s leading the charge with regards to cloud adoption, is using the architecture to distinguish their businesses, Telford said. They’re using cloud infrastructure and services, combined with analytics, to wholly rethink how their business works, from supply-chain processes to customer relations, he said.

Indeed, much of that analytical muscle will itself be provided via the cloud — a fact underscored just days ago by IBM’s announcement that it might begin offering its partners cloud APIs into its Watson natural-language query engine.

Another surprise within the research — Telford was careful to name it a “correlation” not a cause — was how Pacesetters are outpacing the opposite two segments from a financial perspective.

Specifically, Pacesetters’ compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and a couple of012 beat the Chasers group by 1.9x for revenue and 2.4x for gross profit.

“a 3rd takeaway from the info is how Pacesetters are planning for the longer term,” Telford told InformationWeek in a follow-up phone call. These organizations are thinking beyond using the cloud for storage or other infrastructure-layer functions, and are planning to take advantage of its services as “building blocks” for brand new services, including industry-specific solutions, he said.

“This was one of the vital reasons we invested in SoftLayer,” Telford said, concerning IBM’s $2 billion purchase of the seven-year-old infrastructure-as-a-service company in July.

SoftLayer’s robust infrastructure becomes the core of what he called “composable” services from which businesses will roll out their very own offerings.

Pacesetters said the highest three most beneficial capabilities of their “cloud of the longer term” will be:

• Product/service building blocks: Easy-to-assemble industry or business service components they could use to build new product or service.
• (Even bigger) big data: Access to and management of vast data stores they can not get to now. They are not alone here; this was a top pick across all three groups.
• Industry-specific platforms: Cloud platforms with applications and computing environments designed specifically for his or her industry.

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