On October 9th, 2018 we published a press release announcing the launch of Liferay DXP Cloud. Since then, a lot of things happened and we are excited to celebrate our 2-year anniversary today.

Liferay Cloud has grown from a handful of people into an established group present in all regions of the globe. The Liferay DXP Cloud platform evolved from a simple concept into an enterprise-ready solution. Our customer base now includes major brands such as SkyTV, Vodafone, and Gympass, which are serving hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

Taking a Look Back

Lots of things have changed, but our vision remained intact: To give developers the power to deliver better solutions faster. Liferay DXP Cloud will continue to redefine the entire deployment experience and provide the most advanced software development lifecycle for building, testing, and launching enterprise applications to the market.

In 2019, our main challenge was proving that Liferay DXP Cloud could be an effective solution to solve real business needs. The increasing number of closed deals showed that we found product-market fit. And companies were no longer taking six months to a year in order to move to production.

In 2020, we entered a new phase, which could be summarized in two words - product maturity. Now that we proved ourselves to the market, the challenge was addressing the most complex needs of large IT organizations. Instead of building new capabilities, we decided to focus on improving customer journeys such as Onboarding, Migration, Go-Live, and Upgrade.

Cloud Trends in 2021 and Beyond

As we look into the future, it's clear that cloud computing will continue to play a major role in all industries. More than ever, we believe that Liferay DXP Cloud can be a key agent for business transformation. Here are some trends that we believe will shape enterprise cloud computing in 2021.

The Establishment of the Container Era

We all heard the promise of "build it once, run it anywhere" and it's now safe to say that the promise has been fulfilled. Containers are more portable and offer greater flexibility than VMs. They are helping enterprise companies to modernize legacy applications while providing the ability to be platform-agnostic. 

We see the rapid adoption of container technology in the market. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.

Liferay DXP Cloud continues to trust in container engines such as Docker and orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes. However, we still believe that these technologies don't solve all problems and there's room for a higher level of abstraction that helps with Security, Governance, Monitoring, and Management.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Becomes a Commodity

Most IaaS solutions are offered by large technology providers who have the physical scale and geographical scope necessary to deliver on-demand infrastructure. Despite the attractiveness of this model, we see that cloud computing has commoditized compute, storage, and networking resources.

Liferay DXP Cloud believes in the power of PaaS, which bridges the gap between IaaS and SaaS, with a focus on software development and fast iterations. The economic uncertainty faced in 2020 makes us conclude that time-to-market has never been so important.

Multi-Cloud Will Be a Driver for Business Continuity

One of the biggest advantages of multi-cloud strategies is to reduce vendor lock-in. Although this is a very important topic to consider, the reality we see is that applications are rarely migrated once they have been deployed in production by large enterprises.

In our view, a multi-cloud approach brings other benefits to the table. Topics such as functionality pairing, procurement process, and risk mitigation look much more attractive than just portability.

Liferay DXP Cloud will adopt a multi-cloud strategy in 2021 and we are confident that this will help us expand businesses on a global scale. By having a multi-provider disaster recovery plan, companies will be able to achieve an even stronger business continuity strategy.

Thank You!

Our entire team would like to say thanks to all our existing customers and partners. The past two years have been amazing and we are looking forward to many more together.