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

Contributed article by Scott Geng, CTO of Egenera

Five New Cloud Services You Will Be Talking About in 2013

A recent IDC survey found that by 2013, data center managers expect to allocate nearly 50 percent of their annual budgets to deploy mission critical applications in the cloud, both public and private. As we continue to see cloud grow into a must-have for businesses of all sizes, it has become increasingly clear that more and more applications will be delivered ‘as a Service.' 

It is clear that the most popular cloud services this year were Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Both of these services have been extremely popular and have seen tremendous growth. In fact, according to Gartner, worldwide SaaS revenue was forecasted to reach $14.5 billion in 2012, a 17.9 percent increase from 2011.

But as we look ahead to 2013, we ask the question, can everything be delivered as a service? Obviously SaaS, IaaS and PaaS are the veterans on the ‘as a Service' team. At the same time, the diversity in cloud offerings is only accelerating. Some of the new recruits that we expect to hear more of next year include: Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Metal as a Service (MaaS), Mobile Backend as a Service (BaaS), Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

1. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is at the forefront of people's minds these days and will become more popular as businesses realize it will help IT address many of its biggest challenges. Because of this, DRaaS is rapidly becoming the killer app for the cloud - with service providers, IT resellers and start-ups all expected to jump on board in 2013. DRaaS has the potential to make disaster recovery implementations less expensive and more automated, and a necessary powerful tool in any continuity portfolio.


2. Metal as a Service (MaaS) merges high-performance computing with the instant provisioning and pricing advantages of the cloud. It is designed for workloads with extreme I/O demands and calculation-heavy applications. More service providers are getting and understanding this message and setting up bare metal clouds.


3. Backend as a Service (BaaS), or mobile backend, is a space populated by half a dozen or more companies. It's an exciting time for this area and it looks to change application development significantly. According to a report from MarketsandMarkets, the global BaaS market is estimated to grow from $216.5 million in 2012 to $7.7 billion in 2017. This comes as no surprise as opportunities in the mobile app market have grown significantly and have become a successful business segment in the IT market.


4. Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is a logical concept in the evolution of cloud services, in that standardized processes have already been wrapped around SaaS offerings. Ovum principal analyst believes that BPaaS is a future vision that has not yet resonated with buying organizations because most marketing messages are reminiscent of the early hype around cloud services. Because of this, we will look to see the BPaaS marketing messages become clear and concise and more people will begin to take notice and talk about it into next year and beyond.


5. Lastly, Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) hosted and managed by a third-party cloud service provider. DaaS has a multi-tenancy architecture, is purchased on a subscription basis and the service provider manages the back-end while the customer maintains responsibility for user data, desktop management, and software licensing. Until now, DaaS has been viewed by companies as largely experimental but in the next year the DaaS market will hit an inflection point. This coming growth is being driven by the realization that even with VDI, desktop management is a huge time suck and organizations are scrutinizing budgets, looking to rent versus own where possible. In addition, cloud is gaining broader acceptance and service providers are looking to differentiate and add new cloud services to their portfolios. As a result, the DaaS market in 2013 will hit critical mass and we will see DaaS offerings and wins from big name service providers and end users.

As more and more companies start moving to the cloud, more cloud segments and services are sure to spring up. Whether they are filling a certain void in the industry that needs to addressed or latching on to the ‘as a service' trend, next year we are sure to see further growth in the cloud and in the additional offerings of cloud services.

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