What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2011? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed Article By Fred Kohout, CMO, UC4 Software
2011 – Cloud Management Comes of Age
2011 will be the year automation, virtualization and cloud fully intersect. Here are three predictions that we'll see throughout 2011.
1) The rise of Service Governance - Automation is going to take center stage as the shift from job scheduling to workload automation to real time infrastructure continues. Dynamic orchestration of resources, what Gartner calls service governance, will require an intelligent automation engine at its core. In IT, automation will orchestrate workloads across hybrid environments, operating systems and applications. Service governance, as its natural evolution, will predictively diagnose and trigger resources at precisely the right times, around the clock, reducing manual resource requirements and capacity expense and limiting virtual and cloud sprawl.
2) Mission-critical applications go virtual - CIOs are increasingly mandating that the default position for servers should be virtualized. To date, enterprises have been hesitant to move production applications into virtual environments given performance and management issues. In 2011, we'll see a paradigm shift as the cost savings are just too big to be ignored. Second, there's an increasing level of comfort and success with virtualized environments. We've gone through the first wave with test and development and are now ready for mission critical. Finally, virtualization management tools are now sophisticated and mature enough to give enterprises the confidence to put their business critical apps into virtual environments.
3) Virtualization management maturation shines the spotlight on cloud management strategies - The adoption of hybrid computing environments will continue to increase in 2011. However, reality will set in as more customers realize they have to manage and integrate it with the rest of their IT infrastructure. It's no small task. What they're going to find out is that they have to work out integration back into legacy environments. Customers will also need to get a clearer sense of the labor and management overhead it takes to set up and tear down cloud environments.
About the Author
Fred Kohout serves as the Chief Marketing Officer or UC4 Software and has more than two decades of experience in bringing new technology to market and building global brands. As CMO, Kohout is responsible for branding, go-to-market, and product marketing activities at UC4. Most recently, he was CMO of TAGSYS, an early-stage RFID technology company. Kohout also held senior positions in sales and marketing during his 18-year tenure with Sun Microsystems, including Vice President of Marketing for Europe, Middle East, and Africa; Vice President of SPARCserver Product Marketing; and Vice President of Client Software Product Marketing.