Contributed Article By Skip Bacon, CTO at Virtual Instruments 

2011 Private Cloud Prediction

One of the key outcomes from the "Great Recession," which thankfully has come to a close, is the notion that IT resources and asset efficiency will be highly scrutinized.   Wasteful IT spending simply won't be tolerated.  

The theme of "doing more with less" will continue into 2011 and beyond, and it's one of the many reasons why virtualization has been so successful as it helps IT efficiency and ROI in very meaningful ways.   However, virtualized environments and the cloud leave much to the unknown, as enterprises struggle with SAN I/O visibility issues due to the increasing complexity of the modern data center.  As more layers are added, the need for comprehensive, real-time monitoring of I/O increases exponentially.

My prediction for 2011 reflects this new reality.   After speaking to dozens of large enterprise IT organizations over the last year, my perspective is that private cloud adoption for business-critical applications remains gated by the ability to monitor and analyze the cloud infrastructure.  This was reinforced by our annual virtualization survey, conducted at VMworld San Francisco in August of this year, where 43 percent of respondents had no current plans to implement private clouds, with 23 percent planning to implement a private cloud in the next 12 months.  Cloud interest is certainly high but, production deployments are rare.

2011 will still primarily be a year of experimentation with private clouds.  Most enterprise IT staff time will be spent on designing and architecting private clouds as opposed to actually deploying them in production.  Without the ability to monitor the infrastructure to guarantee availability and performance SLAs in the cloud, the risk of moving business-critical applications to a private or public cloud is simply too high.

About the Author

Skip Bacon is responsible for product strategy and planning, ensuring that Virtual Instruments products uniquely meets customers' needs.  Skip has more than 19 years of experience in product development and planning, leading efforts at companies such as Vendavo Inc., Siebel Systems, GT Capital Management, Oracle Corp. and MicroStrategy.  Most recently, he served as chief technology officer and senior vice president of product management at Vendavo Inc., a leading provider of B2B price optimization solutions.  

During his tenure, the company shipped its largest-ever product release and more than doubled its revenues.  Prior to Vendavo, Skip served as group vice president of application technology at Siebel Systems (now part of Oracle), where he had responsibility for Siebel's Enterprise CRM application platforms, which were deployed by 4,000 customers worldwide. Skip holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and attended the Program for Management Development at Harvard Business School.