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

Contributed article by Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB

DBaaS Solutions and PostgreSQL will Steal the Cloud Database Spotlight

Next year will be the year when the DBaaS will become the new PaaS. To date, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has meant development and testing, a place for start-ups and solo developers to easily and inexpensively develop their apps. PaaS solutions won't disappear, but a new wave of PaaS solutions will evolve, and they'll be led by Databases-as-a-Service (DBaaS). DBaaS, as a platform, will be an important driver for SMBs and enterprise departments to start moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Apps can remain in-house and pointed to the DBaaS' load balancing port in the cloud. With the easy-to-use GUI console, adding nodes as well as cloning and replicating becomes a cinch. This will open the doors to expanded IT migration to the cloud.

The NoSQL Luster Starts to Rub Off

Horizontally scaling relational databases will become the dominant database deployment in the cloud. NoSQL databases have their place in the market, but as a result of their limitations, lack of standards and lack of tools, the majority of cloud-based database deployments will be based on an evolution of the long-proven relational model and not based on a complete database paradigm revolution.

In addition, we'll start to see big companies become buddy-buddy with the up-and-comers to bring flexible, high performance, low-cost Exadata alternatives to the masses for both public and private clouds. Oracle has proven with Exadata that there is a fast growing need for a converged platform that integrates relational database technology with analytics and "big data" capability, all optimized to perform well on a hardware platform.

This Cloud is Off Limits

We'll start to see private cloud use grow exponentially, with companies shifting their focus from cost savings to the ease of provisioning and managing workloads. With cloud frameworks such as Citrix's CloudPlatform and Eucalyptus, we were able to see how private cloud enablement could help IT shops reduce costs by truly offering 'services.' But what many companies realized is that the move to private clouds won't come without cost. However, the ancillary benefit of easy, safe and fast provisioning of those 'services' will be more beneficial to us than just the cost savings.

Money, It's a Hit

Speaking of money, making money in the cloud will take priority over "cool" technology as vendors start demanding ROI for their platforms. Watch as platform providers begin to "follow the lead" of Amazon and Microsoft's Azure with offerings designed to generate  mainstream revenue,  like relational databases. This is where alternative mature, open source database technologies like PostgreSQL will become a more dominant standard and a compelling alternative to Amazon RDS (MySQL) and Windows Azure SQL Database (SQL Server).

After the traction PostgreSQL has experienced this year, PostgreSQL is going to become the ‘de facto' database in the cloud in 2013. With Oracle now owning MySQL, it's only a matter of time before the voids in the MySQL community become unworkable for users.

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