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

Contributed article by Raj Sabhlok and Gibu Mathew, ManageEngine

From Hype to Hybrid - The Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing

With the end of the year approaching, it's time to dust off the crystal ball and gaze into the virtualization and cloud future of 2013. Here are the three primary trends we see:

1.   Enterprise cloud computing will lean towards hybrid clouds.

The debate over the best cloud model - public, private or hybrid - will undoubtedly continue for years to come. But in 2013, enterprises will increasingly hedge their risks by having either disaster recovery or their main data center in Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, Rackspace or one of the other public clouds. The trigger for this will be the maturity of the public cloud offerings and their ability to deliver on their SLA promises.

Between disaster recovery and primary data center, having disaster recovery in their own data centers would feel safer for most organizations - after all, when things fall apart, you have more control over accessing your data. In a public cloud, by contrast, you're dependent on the public cloud provider to put the pieces back together. Moreover, on a day-to-day basis, the operating expense for a disaster recovery site would be lower than the operating expense for a main data center.

As the usage of public clouds picks up, there will also be a call for public clouds to support a wider range of application platforms including RDBMS, enterprise middleware, NOSQL, etc. Here, we're talking about out-of-the-box support, which makes enterprise adoption easier. There will also be a need for more compatibility between application infrastructures used in private clouds and public clouds.

2.   Virtualization vendors with a public cloud offering will have an edge.

Most hypervisor vendors have a public cloud offering, and it will ease the case for hybrid cloud. Hypervisor providers for private clouds will bolster their case for adoption as a virtualization platform in the enterprise if they have a public cloud offering. Why? Because enterprises seeing the benefit of public clouds can trial the providers' public cloud offerings too. These extensions will help enterprises reap the benefits of cloud and virtualization while they remain on the fence about making an all-out move to public clouds.

All major hypervisor vendors - namely, VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat - already have a cloud play and that clearly reflects to the market sentiment. Red Hat, too, is getting ready with OpenShift to complement its kernel-based virtual machine (KVM). No clear prediction on how Citrix will play this out as they do not have a public cloud offering - yet.

3.   Hybrid demands influence IT management tools.

Leveraging the benefits of both on-premise and on-demand will help the virtualization and cloud transformation for enterprise IT management. The need for traditional systems management tools in the SaaS model will soon be felt as small and medium enterprises have already gotten comfortable with the idea of SaaS for their business apps.

A recent Gartner survey notes 71 percent of enterprise users have been using SaaS in some way or the other. This adoption will give them the confidence needed to trial even more capabilities in the SaaS model for their IT management. The benefits of reduced complexity and software maintenance provided by newer SaaS companies help this case further.

Users in the IT department prize ease of use, and they expect a "set it and forget it" approach to the server, application and other IT management and monitoring tools. SaaS delivers on both fronts. However, IT departments will still need on-premise IT management tools as long as hybrid data centers are in use.

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