Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Sinclair Schuller, Apprenda

Four Predictions on How Private PaaS Will Reshape Cloud Computing in 2013

1.       Hybrid Cloud Will Move from the IaaS Layer to the PaaS Layer - It's quite clear that in enterprise IT, hybrid cloud will be the end state rather than everything being all public or all private. To date, hybrid cloud discussions have been focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). As a practical matter, whether a workload should be run on a private cloud or on a public cloud requires a sophisticated understand of the business requirements, the architecture of the application in question, and the dependencies that application may have. IaaS is not "close enough" to the application to understand this level of detail, and makes a poor vehicle for delivering on a hybrid cloud vision. Practitioners are starting to realize this. In 2013, these practitioners will look to their PaaS layers for the necessary capabilities to pool public and private resources together, and to manage workloads across the boundary. PaaS layers have a much more intimate relationship with application workloads and can extract the knowledge necessary to properly deliver efficient, application-centric private cloud.

2.       Private PaaS Will Create the Foundation for Enterprises to Adopt Public Cloud - Enterprise adoption of public cloud has been relatively unimpressive. Heavy investments are being made in private cloud, however. Interestingly, most of those investments are being made with "future proofing" around hybrid cloud, ensuring that enterprise IT can leverage their existing private cloud investments as a vehicle to push workloads to public cloud when appropriate. Given private PaaS' emerging role in hybrid cloud in 2013, private PaaS will become the defacto vehicle for packaging application workloads in a cloud friendly way, and being the "stepping stone" to moving those workloads to public cloud as enterprises become more comfortable with security and performance.

3.       PaaS Will Have to Catch Up to its Promises - Most PaaS vendors have delivered a healthy dose of over-promise and under-deliver. PaaS technologies have placed emphasis on the ease at which applications can be deployed and scaled. This sort of tactical value produces near sighted results that do not fulfill the promise of a "platform", but rather of a modernized version of a management tool. 2013 will be a year where enterprise customers will demand more of PaaS, and in particular, of private PaaS. The expectation will be that PaaS will provide a foundation for modernizing existing applications, but also catalyze the next 10 years of next generation application development in mobile, web services, distributed applications, and web-scale properties. Only very few vendors cater to delivering a platform that enhances existing applications with next generation architectures and outcomes, and 2013 will be the year where other vendors play "catch-up."

4.       Private PaaS Will Be Adopted as a Key way to Extract More Value from Virtualization - Virtualization defined the last era of computing. Cloud is causing a sea change, and new layers in the ever evolving cloud stack are emerging. Private PaaS is layer that abstracts away underlying resources - including virtualization - allowing for finer grained resource utilization. Enterprises will look to the utilization boost provided by private PaaS to drive additional leverage against existing investments in virtualization technology.

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About the Author

Sinclair Schuller is the CEO of Apprenda. With his two co-founders, Apprenda has secured $16M in venture capital from funds NEA, Ignition Partners and High Peak Ventures to deliver private and public PaaS to .NET developers. Apprenda is the best way for Microsoft-based organizations to build and deploy next generation enterprise applications or modernize existing applications for the cloud. Sinclair serves on multiple venture networks and speaks nationally on the topics of enterprise IT efficiency, cloud computing and next generation enterprise architectures. Before Apprenda, Sinclair held positions at Morgan Stanley, Eden Communications, and consulted for the State University of New York's (SUNY) vast IT systems. Sinclair holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.