What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Lilac Berniker, senior director of business development, Fortisphere
2010 Predictions
It is the time of year for prognostication, which always struck me as odd. The turning of an arbitrary calendar seems to inspire not reflection, but rather, prediction, the former of which would be a great deal easier. To mix it up a bit, I thought I might infuse these predictions with a bit of analysis.
Time to Grow Up
The first and most encompassing change to the virtual world in the coming year will be the maturation of the environment and its administration. With more rules, processes and order come stability and predictability, but all these lessons were absent from earlier generations of the virtual environment.
If this infrastructure is to form the foundations of the entire business, it must be governed accordingly. Many of the best practices of generations past, like ITIL, will be revived, and tailored to this new environment. Some may lament the loss of freedom and flexibility, but those are the price of scale and reliability.
The Losers: Those who ardently cling to the first wave, rejecting new processes and management. Mature management requires mature administrators.
The Winners: Those who respect the traditions of enterprise management, and can bring together the best of lessons learned while maintaining as much of the benefits of the virtual infrastructure for their company.
Caveat Emptor
Absent in much of the discussion to date in virtualization is the business customer. In 2010, things will change. Increasingly, customers of the virtual infrastructure understand its limits and its strengths, and are angling not only for the financial benefits thereof, but also for stronger information about the environment, once it has been provisioned. Visibility, assurances and support will all become common requests, which, in turn, will feed the maturation of the environment noted above. It may be a new infrastructure, but they are still the customers, and they still need good service.
The Losers: Virtualization groups who think they can force feed virtualization on the organization. Remarkable reasons for “needing a physical box” will emerge in their companies.
The Winners: Those who use this as an opportunity to shape their relationship with the business. With more transparency and service will come a more strategic role in the company as a whole.
From Nine Stitches to One
Until now, many IT shops have been solving the multitude of little, nagging management issues by downloading one tool or another to help alleviate the pain. Unfortunately, while these tools are nifty and often quite visually attractive, they don’t support the first prediction, which is more rigorous, grown-up management. Enterprise systems are managed by integrated, scalable management technologies, in part because the challenges faced in the environment are much more holistic than a little application can address. Utilization must be married with service level before you know if you’re overprovisioned. It’s no use knowing something is down, if you can’t identify the configuration change.
In 2010, the world of widget management will give way to more integrated management technologies that are both tailored to the virtual environment and holistic in their approach. One big stitch will save many many little ones along the way.
The Losers: Companies that make the little widgets. It’s not easy to transform products into enterprise solutions.
The Winners: Customers seeking integrated management. With strong options entering the market, they can find the tools to facilitate the maturing management of the virtual environment.
Battle of the Titans
In 2010, the unspoken war between the systems management companies and the major hypervisor vendors will escalate, as it has every year for the past few years. With the increasing viability and popularity of multiple hypervisor platforms, the domain is being rapidly commoditized, and, as has been well-documented, this is prompting a leap to systems management for some.
The irony of this battle is that the challenges of virtualization management will not be easily met by either group. The hypervisor vendors, with incredible skills in the domain of very complex operating system design, aren’t management experts and haven’t the internal skills to rapidly change that. The Big Four are encumbered by their existing product plans, and their architectures are often ill-suited to the new domain. In a battle of titans, however, the most likely outcome is a stalemate.
The Losers: Customers loyal to any of these major players, banking on the resolution of this battle in the next year. The outcome will not be evident for at least 24 months, and in the mean time, IT departments need to manage their environments.
The Winners: Customers willing to look elsewhere for their solutions. In markets where the incumbents are more focused on the battle than the customer, it is best to turn elsewhere to meet your needs.
Skip the Commercials
2010 will be a pitched battle for dominance over the virtualization management market, with all the propaganda associated with any large contest. Customers are increasingly feeling the growing pains of the maturation of their environment, and will soon tire of the chest beating and the empty promises of any of the large players. Customers will take on the mantra of “Show Me.” Real product and real functionality will win over promises of future grandeur.
The Losers: The marketing machines of the largest firms in this fray will find themselves without an audience. Success will come from product development, not from messaging.
The Winners: Customers who seek out and evaluate real products offered in the market. With this wave of advertising skepticism, companies that can deliver tangible value today will be more than willing to show you a demo and give you a chance to test their product.
None of these predictions mentioned Cloud Computing, the hottest topic of the day. Cloud computing will likely mutate and change in the coming year, as much as it has in the past, splintering from a single, external on-demand paradigm to 5-10 flavors ranging from on-premise clustering to timesliced hosting. It is inevitable because its definitions are so flexible, and therefore didn’t seem worthy of prediction.
About the Author
Lilac Berniker is senior director of business development at Fortisphere. Part of the grid and virtualization community since 1997, Berniker has held roles within the grid open-standards organization, The Globus Alliance, the Grid division at IBM, and as a strategic consultant managing relationships with leading enterprise software and hardware firms. In the past, she has also held positions with Fidelity Investments, Innosight, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Berniker holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Pacific Lutheran University, and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.