I'd like to personally welcome each and every one of you to the start of 2012!  As we begin what will certainly prove to be a fantastic new year, I wanted to make sure to thank all of the loyal member's and readers of VMblog.com.  Once again, with the help of each of you, VMblog has been able to remain one of the oldest and most successful virtualization and cloud news sites on the Web -- providing readers with valuable information in these expanding markets for the last 8 years!  Man, has this industry changed since 2004 or what?

I'd also like to take this time to once again thank my many valued sponsors for their continued support throughout 2011:  Acronis, Citrix, CommVault, CopperEgg, DataCore Software, EMC, Liquidware Labs, Parallels, Quest Software, Starwind Software, Surgient, Symantec, Veeam, VKernel, VMTurbo, Vyatta and Zenoss.  You guys help make this site possible! 

2011 was an amazing year for our shared technology and passion. Each year, we've been increasing our little club of virtualization and cloud enthusiasts and I expect 2012 to continue that trend at an increasing rate.  2011 witnessed a lot of changes in our community.  We've seen a lot of fan favorite companies get acquired, and you can bet that in 2012, we'll see more make or break opportunities for a lot of the remaining companies.  But luckily, we'll also see an explosion of new startups trying to take advantage of some of the new technologies being made available, which should prove exciting to watch.  So strap yourselves in, raise and lock your seat trays, and please put your seats in the upright position. 2012 is going to get interesting!

To help us predict just how interesting things will get, VMblog has continued its fun and successful Executive Prediction Series.  This is the 4th year in a row for the series, and it's bigger than ever this year!  With nearly 100 executives checking in this year, we have predictions from some old familar names as well as many new comers to the series.  And this year, company executives have taken on server virtualization, application virtualization, storage virtualization, desktop virtualization, as well as big data, networking, security, I/O optimization, SSD, databases, public, private and hybrid clouds... and more!  Some of these executives have even opted to take a look back at last year's predictions to see how well they did. 

If you didn't have a chance to keep up with the series throughout the months of November and December, now is your chance to catch up and read what these experts have predicted. Enjoy!

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• RES Software: 2012 - The Year of Context-aware ITaaS - With the increasing adoption of devices such as smartphones, tablets, touch sensitive screens and sub compact, ultra portable hardware, enterprises are going to realize that their employees are using these to access data and applications throughout the day. Android, Windows 7 (with the launch of Win... Read More...


• Novell: Virtualization - Hyped in 2011, Still Won't be the Enterprise Cure-All in 2012 - Virtualization, specifically client virtualization and VDI infrastructures, was one of, if not the most hyped technology of 2011. While Gartner has predicted that virtualization will be the highest-impact trend in the infrastructure and operations market through 2012, the reality is setting in that ... Read More...


• DataCore Software: 2012 Predictions - Storage Hypervisors, Virtualization, SSDs, "Big Data," Clouds and Their Real World Impacts - Storage has been slow to adopt change and still remains one of the most static elements of today's IT infrastructures. I believe this is due to a history of storage being driven from a hardware mindset. The storage industry, for the most part, has been controlled by a few major vendors who have been... Read More...


• Interxion: 2012 Predictions - The Power of the System Integrator - 2011 marked a significant year for cloud computing. More companies realized the efficiency benefits of moving to the cloud, and it became abundantly clear that this is no passing trend. In fact, with half of Gartner's top predictions for IT organizations and users for 2012 and beyond centered on the... Read More...


• IBM System Networking: Data Center Networking in 2012 - Top 10 Predictions - The data center network is experiencing a major transformation to support server virtualization and cloud computing, convergence of data storage, application-to-application traffic and new high-performance applications. To address these needs, the data center network will become smarter and faster i... Read More...


• SunGard: Four Predictions for Enterprises Cloud Services in 2012 - The past year saw the term "cloud" gain unprecedented visibility, moving it from the realm of tech into ubiquitous, consumer-friendly language. The cloud's growth in popularity, however, didn't necessarily translate into adoption-many enterprises and consumers alike both viewed the cloud with some a... Read More...


• Certeon: What 2012 Means for WAN Optimization - For 2012 we have a pressure cooker - a mature WAN networking industry with billions of market cap tied up in it, battling it out over a well-known set of capabilities simmering in the pot. Customer demand is cranking up the heat, as cloud requirements for WAN optimization shift from proprietary netw... Read More...


• Couchbase: Big data, NoSQL and Mobile Sync. Three peas. One pod. - A few months ago I had the good fortune to hear VMware CEO Paul Maritz speak at a conference. Asked "which trends would you identify that will have the biggest impact on IT in the coming decade?" Paul identified two: cloud computing, and the transition underway in at the data layer - specifically me... Read More...


• Big Switch Networks: 2012 in Networking - When Worlds Collide (this is not a movie title!) - If you've seen the movie "2012" or read any recent popular articles about the Mayan calendar, you know that 2012 already has its fair share of predictions! While I'm pretty confident that the world will still exist in 2013, I do think the space of networking will indeed undergo major changes in 2012... Read More...


• HyTrust: 2012 Cloud & Virtualization Security Predictions - The explosion of APTs against high-profile companies and government agencies we saw in 2011 will become even more predominant in 2012. Organizations that come under fire from APTs will be at heightened risk, suffering tremendous credibility and financial loss.... Read More...


• Zenoss: Cloud Predictions for 2012 - As we say goodbye to 2011, it's been an incredible year of technology as the cloud continues to mature. Here are my predictions for 2012:... Read More...


• Citrix: Predictions 2012 - Networking - The super-prediction for networking in 2012 can be summarized in one word. Change. The key drivers of this change - cloud and mobility - have steadily gained strength through 2011. Now, the datacenter is changing. The aApps are changing. And so is the way these apps are delivered and consumed... Read More...


• VirtualSharp: 2012 Predictions - Recovery as a Service (RaaS) Accelerates Public Cloud Adoption - Public clouds have gained credibility in 2011 and have become a choice to fulfill computing needs at many companies. We have seen many of them deploy or migrate mission critical workloads to public clouds, while big IT players improve their offerings more and more. It is similar as when you see troo... Read More...


• Embotics: 2012 Prediction - IT, Management to Agree on Meaning of "Cloud" - The Merriam-Webster dictionary has five definitions for the word "cloud." None of them apply to IT, but the variability between "a visible mass of particles of condensed vapor" and "something that obscures or blemishes" is instructive to anyone working in the data center. In the past year, everyone ... Read More...


• Nimbula: Cloud Computing Predictions for 2012 - The prominence of cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service pro... Read More...


• Nastel: Application Testing will Move to the Cloud - There is an argument to be made that a considerable economic advantage can be acquired by moving preproduction application testing to the cloud. We all know that the application lifecycle cost can be reduced significantly by more effective testing; especially, since the earlier a defect is found, th... Read More...


• SUSE: Interoperability the Priority in 2012 Hypervisor Wars - In the last few years, competition has been steadily increasing in the hypervisor world, with ESX (VMware) leading the pack and others, like Hyper-V (Microsoft), Xen and KVM making steady inroads. In 2012, will Hyper-V3 finally start getting significant traction? Will there be rapid migration toward... Read More...


• ScaleXtreme: The Coming Cloud Commodity - Rapeseed, sweet light crude, carbon dioxide, molybdenum and purified terephthalic acid will share a spot in markets all over the world with a new product. But this new commodity won't be measured in tons, barrels, bushels or troy ounces.... Read More...


• Cleversafe: Top Four predictions for Big Data in the Cloud in 2012 - As big data continues to grow even bigger in 2012, we expect four key trends to impact cloud storage deployments:... Read More...


• Quantum: 2012 Storage Predictions - Often throughout 2011, when "the cloud" was discussed almost without question the conversation around the make-up of cloud was compute, network, virtualization and lots of disk storage - but if "the cloud" is really going to store as much data as some of the research firms have estimated - then anot... Read More...


• Gazzang: 2012 Forecast - Heavy Clouds Bring Winds of Change in Open Source, Security Climate - 2011 was the year of cloud "talk". 2012 is the year of cloud "action". While organizations are ready to take off into the cloud, they have been stalled due to lack of automation and support tools. 2012 is the year all that changes. Automation and support applications have seen heavy development and ... Read More...


• Centrix: End-User Computing (EUC) Will Truly be About the User in 2012 - Of course the most obvious happening in EUC for 2012 is the wider scale migration of corporate desktops to Windows 7. This is where the most focus, effort and investment will be during 2012.... Read More...


• Virtual Bridges: Batter Up - VDI Predictions for 2012 - While first generation VDI solutions were known for being costly, complex and limited in coverage, VDI Gen2 has removed that burden and is knocking it out of the park by reducing the expense and complications that plagued earlier solutions. In 2012 we will see even more separation in the standings a... Read More...


• Citrix: 2012 - The Year of Emotionally Resonant Simplicity - 2012 will certainly see further market growth and technical evolution of enterprise virtualization technologies, along with competing cloud platforms for public/private data access. From a user experience (UX) perspective, however, certain drivers are starting to become apparent as "consumerization"... Read More...


• Virtual Computer: 2012 The Year When - VDI Flips to IDV and the PC Becomes Cool Again - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI has certainly gotten a lot of publicity over the past year. With the marketing might of VMware and Citrix behind it, we would have been a bit shocked if it hadn't gotten a lot of buzz. VDI has also been riding the wave of tablets and a perception in the media... Read More...


• Lanamark: The Business Model of the IT Channel Needs to Evolve for Growth Opportunities in 2012 and Beyond - Today's turbulent economic climate is forcing companies to rethink their IT infrastructure investment strategies and shift towards consumption of IT-as-a-Service. The pride and prestige of owning IT assets has quickly become diminished and companies are looking at how they can shift their spending f... Read More...


• Boundary: Big Data, DevOps, and SaaS Invade IT Management - After years and years of incremental, steady improvements, it is inevitable that IT management will eventually take a huge and fundamental leap forward. I say that in both a thoughtful and a hopeful way - this being a great season for both. The building blocks for that change have been in the wo... Read More...


• F5 Networks: Should Auld (Network) Acquaintance Be Forgot… - Early in the cloud and virtualization hype cycle we woke as from a fugue and seemed to remember there was a network under all that new technology and that it was critical to successful implementation in the future. As the hype continued to grow, however, the focus shifted - as it often always does -... Read More...


• OK Labs: 2012 – The End of Mobile As We Know It - With 2012 just around the corner, there's plenty of gloomy crystal ball-gazing going on: more war, famine, financial crises, asteroids colliding with Earth - you know, the usual stuff. My visions for 2012 are instead of the mobile, not the Mayan kind. Not catastrophic, but definitely game-changin... Read More...


• Apprenda: PaaS – Your 2012 Cloud Secret Weapon - In 2012, as cloud utilization continues to skyrocket, we’ll see enterprises deploying private Platform as a Service (PaaS), which will bring new types of agility and economics to the IT department and corporations.... Read More...


• Pano Logic: 2012 VDI Prediction - VDI is a journey. The trends that we see in the coming year will be more users making the move to VDI as they build confidence in the technology. Server virtualization started in 1997 and it wasn’t really until 10 years later that people became comfortable enough with the technology to deploy missio... Read More...


• Netuitive: Proliferation of Monitoring Tools Driving Emergence of IT Analytics - High profile IT outages are again in the news and have become recognized as the defining example of IT operational risk. According to one survey, computer outages cost American businesses at least $4 billion last year and as business reliance on information technology and cloud computing grows, the... Read More...


• Citrix: What's Ahead for DaaS in 2012? - For the past few years, there has been much anticipation around desktop virtualization making its way into the cloud - Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). Until recently, that expectation has been going unfulfilled, and desktop virtualization has remained largely an internal enterprise endeavor. But in 201... Read More...


• FalconStor: What's in Store for Virtualization and Cloud in 2012? - It's become a familiar end-of-year tradition in high technology for the experts to retreat into a quiet room, dust off their crystal ball, and ask the magic questions about the coming year. Since I don't happen to have a crystal ball of my own, I went online and consulted the many crystal balls in t... Read More...


• Vyatta: 2012 Prediction - Networking Invades The Server - By the end of 2011 Gartner claimed virtualization is now at a tipping point with roughly 50% of all x86 workloads running as a virtual machine. This is fundamentally altering the flow of network traffic, and forces much of the networking and security control to be conducted within the virtualized s... Read More...


• Neverfail: Disaster Recovery is the Cloud Killer App for Small and Medium Businesses - Many smaller businesses are attracted by the potential cost reductions of using the cloud to reduce their IT budgets and more quickly upgrade and extend their applications. The big savings come from deploying existing and new horizontal and vertical applications in the cloud. But there are concerns ... Read More...


• Catbird: 2012 Virtualization and Security Predictions - When I am not thinking about virtualization, I am thinking about the NFL. Which is not to say they have nothing in common. In fact, football is a perfect analogue to a data center. First, they each have physical and virtual instantiations: the real players on the field and a fantasy league. Second... Read More...


• Prowess: Private Cloud is Moving Forward and has the Greatest Promise - 2012 will only be slightly different than this past year. No monumental break-through is going to happen nor amazing tipping point reached. In fact, it will probably be a really uneventful year. But some trends are evolving and maturing and the associated opportunity is really exciting.... Read More...


• Citrix: Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2012 - As 2011 comes to a close, ‘tis the season for predictions where we see everything from bold and far-reaching claims to more pragmatic predictions of what we can expect to see in the coming year. The fun in all of this is the fact that cloud computing is still a wild, wild west style market where id... Read More...


• Citrix: 2012 – Predictions in Desktop Virtualization - 2011 went by so fast, it almost feels like 2012 will be part two of this year. Since I wrote a predictions article for 2011, I wanted to step back and see how these predictions fared and where 2012 is headed.... Read More...


• Citrix: The Slow Death of Generic Security - We've all experienced it - security measures that seem cookie-cutter, irrelevant and invasive. It's called...generic security.... Read More...


• CopperEgg: The State of the New Cloud Supply Chain and SLA Dependencies - It is clear that a growing percentage of business processes and applications that have been traditionally hosted within a company are being provided as online services. Software as a Service is no longer a future possibility; it is commonplace. The same holds true for Business Processes as a Servic... Read More...


• ShoreTel: Enterprise Virtualization - 2012 Predictions - Enterprises embrace virtualization for many good reasons: server consolidation to reduce hardware and operating costs, management efficiency by leveraging virtualized infrastructure tools, ability to migrate to the cloud for agility and increased reliability.... Read More...


• LANDesk Software: Why Choose Cloud or On-Premise? Hybrid is Here - Well folks, 2012 is here and twelve years into the twenty first century, I think it's about time we had a more flexible cloud computing model. While hybrid cloud has been around for several years, I believe the majority of enterprises will adopt a hybrid cloud model next year.... Read More...


• SolidFire: Predictions 2012 - Cloud by Default - Cloud computing has gone from obscure to trendy, to over-hyped, and to mainstream in the last five years. The next logical step is ubiquity, and I think 2012 will be the year when "cloud" starts to become the default model for new infrastructure and software deployments. Instead of justifying why IT... Read More...


• VKernel: 2012 – Year of Hypervisor Heterogeneity - For 2012, we expect to see significantly more environments running multiple hypervisors. There are a couple of data points that lead us to this conclusion.... Read More...


• Stratus Technologies: Cloud Predictions for 2012 - Half of the applications in my company run in the cloud, so when I say 2012 will be a year of "buyers' remorse" it's not because I view cloud computing negatively.... Read More...


• ScaleMP: Solutions will Arise Addressing the Contradiction between Cloud Infrastructure and Platforms Required for Big Data Analytics - This year we witnessed as organizations from all industries and of all sizes struggled to keep up with the growth of data and the emergence of a new trend: big data. According to a 2010 IBM survey, the equivalent of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created by sensors, mobile devices, online transact... Read More...


• Microsoft: 2012 – The Year Cloud Moves from a Buzzword to Reality - 2011 was the year that Cloud became a defined goal - not just for vendors, but for IT departments. We're shifting away from the "What is cloud?" conversations and people are starting to understand what it can do for them and how it's much more than virtualization. This transition was, and still is,... Read More...


• Doyenz: 2012 Predictions for Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery - Many have experienced the panic of sitting at a desk in the office when a disaster hits, whether it is an earthquake or simply spilling a large glass of water on your laptop. For IT systems, the most devastating disasters, however, are not at the hand of Mother Nature-they're most often the result o... Read More...


• Symform: 2012 Cloud Storage Predictions - Data Domination - Petabytes and Zettabytes. Who knew? As we enter 2012, we are adding these words to our everyday vocabulary that at one time seemed far away from reality. But in this coming year, the amount of data we are creating and need to manage, secure, access, backup and analyze will become almost overwhelming... Read More...


• Pivot3: 2012 – The Year VDI Adoption Goes Vertical - Many virtualization enthusiasts assumed the adoption curve for desktop virtualization would be identical to server virtualization. Staggering predictions from leading analysts forecasted that desktop virtualization would sweep across IT regardless of vertical market. Those forecasts never materializ... Read More...


• NaviSite: 2012 Cloud Predictions - In 2011, the hype around cloud computing subsided and real adoption began to accelerate in the second half of the year. Enterprises are more comfortable with the current levels of compliance, security, and reliability and are deploying real applications, such as financial applications, messaging app... Read More...


• Xsigo: 2012 - The Year of the Fabric - 2012 is the year that data center fabrics finally become real. After more than a year of hype, we will see mature, shipping fabrics that address compelling data center issues. Here's a little background on fabrics and seven reasons why they make a difference.... Read More...


• Liquidware Labs: The Changing Face of the Desktop and other Trends in 2012 - I am embarking on my third year of making these executive predictions for VMBlog and have mixed emotions about them: Making predictions is fun. Checking back in 12 months to find out that some of them were wrong is not so much fun. Checking back in 12 months to find out you were right is an ego boo... Read More...


• Symantec: 2012 in Virtualization – Fixing the Breaking Points - We are all familiar with the rapid growth of virtualization technologies in both enterprises and SMBs.It was the number one spending priority in 2011, according to ESG. And, 50 to 60 percent of workloads will be virtualized by 2014 (up from 25 percent today), according to Gartner. At the same ti... Read More...


• CloudSigma: 2012 Cloud Predictions - Expanding Flexibility - "Flexibility" is a growing buzz word in the tech space and is increasingly important as technology and innovation continue to skyrocket. Just as DVDs moved to streaming and books moved to e-readers, so too must cloud computing move to a more flexible model for users, putting them in the driver's sea... Read More...


• ServiceMesh: Don't Let Next Year PaaS You By – Enterprise Cloud Trends for 2012 - In 2011, we saw several enterprises launch their initial cloud deployments. Next year, these will evolve from mostly departmental efforts to new cloud initiatives that deliver broader enterprise business value. Here are five enterprise cloud trends that will help drive this in 2012:... Read More...


• Xangati: 2012 - Performance Management Takes the Steering Wheel - In 2012 performance management jumps from the virtualization backseat to behind the steering wheel and - as it does - Xangati predicts we will see the following along the way:... Read More...


• AppSense: IT Has Lost Control – But Hey It's OK, The Kids are Alright - IT is on the edge of a revolution in the enterprise - the workforce has changed and the new generation of workers prize flexibility and they want to "dance with everyone," by bringing their own devices (Macs, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) into the enterprise. This dance is happening now and will con... Read More...


• CiRBA: Automation is the Logical Next Step for Internal Cloud Environments - 2011 was definitely the year organizations turned their attention to planning internal clouds. The private cloud offers the flexibility and ubiquity of cloud computing together with the security of on-premise management. Unfortunately, as we've seen at CiRBA, to also achieve agility goals, necessi... Read More...


• Wanova: Predictions for 2012 on Desktop Computing in the Enterprise in Face of Consumerization: PC-Plus, not Post-PC - There has been a lot of speculation about the future of PCs, or the lack thereof as highlighted by those positioning a "post-PC" era. As much as some popular vendors would like to see the landscape positioned to favor their lines of business, the reality of the matter is that we are entering a PC-pl... Read More...


• VMware: Predictions for 2012 - What's Next? - I always enjoy the chance to step back at the end of a year, reflect about what really has happened, and then put some predictions out there. And just as in last year's article, I'll lead this one with two of my favorite, relevant quotations:... Read More...


• uptime software: Here's What's Coming in 2012 - Cloud computing and virtualization are at the forefront of today's IT departments, and when used correctly, they can truly help organizations gain IT efficiency. However, if improperly managed, cloud deployments can lead to poor application performance and large budget over-runs. Organizations need ... Read More...


• Enterasys: 2012 Trends Predictions - In 2012, networking will emerge as a business differentiator by aiding application delivery and user experience. Server and application architectures will be dependent on optimized networking for efficiency and cost reduction.... Read More...


• Virtual Instruments: Future Proofing Your Data Center - Are you frustrated from limited visibility into your virtualized data center? When a problem occurs, can you easily find the root cause? Does slow application performance affect your business? Could mere minutes of downtime cost your company millions? If you answered yes to any of these questions, t... Read More...


• CA Technologies: 10 Virtualization and Cloud Predictions for 2012 - Welcome to IT prediction season! Again, I am inspired to throw my exceedingly fallible hat into the ring with my predictions, specifically for virtualization and cloud. I seem to have had a decent run of predictions last year, but I claim more luck than credit. I still think predictions are a mug's ... Read More...


• GigaSpaces: Cloud Trends – Today & Tomorrow - As 2011 winds down, it is a good time to look to trends shaping our industry - how they impacted technology this year and look toward trends for 2012. A good place to start may be with my 2011 predictions and see if my previous (and initial) attempt at predicting held its own.... Read More...


• Netronome: Almost a quarter century after Berlin, will the memory wall finally topple in 2012? - It was Professor Sally McKee of Cornell University who first coined the phrase "memory wall", which referred to the growing disparity in terms of the rate of processor performance improvement (~55% annum) versus the rate of memory performance improvement (~10% per annum). As was correctly projected,... Read More...


• Ipswitch File Transfer: Renting a Film? Buying a House? Five Predictions for Managed File Transfer in a Cloud-Enabled World - Managed File Transfer (MFT) software is already a must-have tool for exchanging massive files between companies and their customers and trading partners. The software provides end-to-end visibility, security and control as files are passed to different applications, are renamed and transformed, and ... Read More...


• Quest Software: 2012 Predictions in Desktop Virtualization - This time last year, I broke out the crystal ball and wrote an article predicting the trends in desktop virtualization that I saw coming in 2011. Now, as we round out the year, I wanted to reflect on how I did on these predictions and lay out what we, at Quest, see is coming in 2012.... Read More...


• Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP): 2012 Cloud Predictions - As IT and business executives begin "bet-your-career" moves to implement cloud initiatives at their companies, they will need to keep the following industry trends in mind to maximize their chances of success and reap the full cloud benefits of business agility and cost savings. Based on our experie... Read More...


• SolarWinds: IT Professionals - Why it's Critical to Move Toward a Business Skill Set to Stay on Top of Virtualization and Cloud Technologies in 2012 - In 2012, IT professionals will come upon a fork in their career path. Thanks to the game-changing nature of virtualization as the foundation of cloud computing, the technology has ushered in new challenges, new day-to-day responsibilities and, soon, new roles for IT professionals as business leaders... Read More...


• Xeround: 2012 Prediction – The Rise of "NewSQL" and Cloud Databases - In the last year, there have been several new startups that have entered the database ecosystem, which has resulted in the creation of a new category called "NewSQL" (as reported by the 451 group). One thing is for certain: SQL is not going anywhere anytime soon, and the growing list of vendors in t... Read More...


• Cortado: The Next Frontier for IT: Post-PC Era, BYOD and the Cloud - As we look back at 2011 and analyze what we have learned and experienced, a few things clearly stand out from the masses: 1) The PC is no longer our go-to device...... Read More...


• Desktone: Reaching the Tipping Point for B.Y.O.D – Impact on the Enterprise - The first time I really started to notice the proliferation of tablets was at VMworld a few months ago. It seemed as though tablets outnumbered laptops by 4 to 1, which reinforces the emergence of the consumerization of IT. Consumers are making an end-run around enterprise IT departments by bring in... Read More...


• Nutanix: 2012 Predictions - Given the Europe contagion, and a slow US recovery, 2012 will be a déjà vu year -- 2009 revisited. Businesses will be cautiously optimistic, and spending on products and technologies where there are opportunities to reduce capital and operational costs. Here are my predictions:... Read More...


• Apica: 2012 - The Year Performance Pays Off - The explosion of web applications and websites moving to the cloud has, in some respect, caused a fair amount of problems with regards to capacity. Given this, not all services have fully kept pace with demand in terms of performance and reliability. But, in 2012, the market will take performance an... Read More...


• Tintri: Datacenter Infrastructure will Adapt to Virtualization or Die Trying - In 2009, virtualization crossed an important threshold. According to IDC, this was the first year that new virtual server deployments exceeded physical server deployments. For every physical server sold, more than one new virtual machine (VM) was created. This trend is accelerating - average VM-to-s... Read More...


• rPath's Practical Cloud Predictions for 2012 - In 2011, IT put many virtual infrastructure shortcomings to rest. With that behind them, IT must be prepared to face a new set of challenges in 2012 -- specifically, the challenge of running practical applications that people actually want and need to use on this infrastructure. Here's what next yea... Read More...


• Virsto Software: Top Five Datacenter Predictions for 2012 - Convergence in the datacenter is inevitable as it addresses two of the biggest concerns that senior IT executives and business leaders have today: 1) the cost of computing, and 2) the cost of IT specialists needed to run and manage servers, networks and storage. As companies bring their assets toget... Read More...


• SuccessFactors: The 2012 Demographic Shift – An Increasingly Social Workforce - Social collaboration platforms are a preferred medium for communicating and sharing content on a personal and professional level. My prediction for 2012 is that social at the workplace will really hit its stride-from sharing content and updates on a social platform to furthering social learning acro... Read More...


• DynamicOps: Consumerization Accelerates Cloud Computing Changes in 2012 - Corporate IT experienced a fair amount of change in 2011, with virtualization mainstreaming and cloud computing making real inroads. But all that pales in comparison to what will happen in 2012, as the world outside the corporate arena drives changes at an even faster pace, impacting the very fabric... Read More...


• Nodeable: 2012 Prediction - Everything Gets Measured - As the number of vendors offering cloud-based services has grown, so too has the need for users to be able to share data across application borders. This typically takes the form of APIs that allow for some level of inter-application communication but will need to expand into real-time networks that... Read More...


• Veeam Software: It is not the Hypervisor, it is the Management - The year 2012 will bring virtualization advances that are different from what we have previously seen. Specifically, infrastructure management will be a key differentiator in virtualization going forward.... Read More...


• HotLink: 2012 - The Year of Virtual Diversity - An important outcome of the broad migration to virtual infrastructure is that IT is now core to many business models, not just a provider of infrastructure to run the business. This movement towards delivering IT as a service will depend on further virtualization advances inside the datacenter and o... Read More...


• STORServer: 2012 Predictions for Backup Appliance Virtual Trends - The backup appliance began its life as a bundle, a conglomeration in a sense, of existing hardware and software. Then, appliances that provided added simplification to backup operations emerged as data copies became easier to locate, disk became relegated tape to archives and off-site copies, and vi... Read More...


• Ciena Corporation: 2012 Cloud Prediction – Enterprises Will Realize They Need a Better Network to the Cloud - If 2011 was the year that enterprises started truly adopting the cloud, then 2012 will be the year they start realizing the need for more intelligent networking connectivity to cloud-based resources, and work to implement such a model.... Read More...


• Credant Technologies: Taking Privacy into the Cloud - Next year will see some big changes in the cloud. Specifically three important changes are about to occur in the way that cloud services, especially cloud storage, are used. Like most significant changes, these have been building quietly for a while, but by the end of 2012, all three will have cau... Read More...


• Quest Software: Virtualization and Cloud Predictions for 2012 - When I look out at the year ahead, I see some clear areas of growth in virtualization and cloud. There will be some marked changes in the ways that IT can serve their users and better align with the business. When working with customers around the world in advancing their use of these key technologi... Read More...


• VMTurbo: 2012 - The Birth of Unified Virtualization Management (UVM) - A central challenge of IT is how to increase virtualization penetration rates from current 40% to fully-virtualized IT (80% and above). According to the Gartner Group: "The use of x86-architecture virtual machines has been increasing at a torrid pace since their introduction in 2001; however, this ... Read More...


• VDIworks: The Future of Virtualization and Cloud Computing - Virtualization, as one of the enabling technologies underpinning the Cloud, continues to be enormously relevant to the evolving future architecture of computing, specifically end-user computing. There are at least two underlying industry directions that make virtualization immensely relevant. First,... Read More...


• Dome9: Two Predictions for Cloud Security in 2012 - 2011 saw tremendous growth in the cloud. For providers and customers alike, cloud is the new frontier of IT, and although we may struggle to efficiently manage and secure it, there’s no doubt that it’s revolutionizing the architecture of today’s enterprise.... Read More...


• NextIO: I/O Virtualization Provides Agility to Solve Tough Virtualization Projects - In 2011, IT departments have been asked to continually do more with less: deploy on-demand clouds and enterprise wide VDI, virtualize mission critical applications, upgrade to 10GbE, and implement ever more complex tiered storage solutions. At the same time, IT budgets have remained flat or even d... Read More...


• Centrify: 2012 in Cloud Computing — Expect More Consumerization and More Security Concerns - Many IT folks and virtualization and cloud vendors see cloud computing as a logical extension of virtualization technologies, and rightly so. But I have always seen cloud computing just as much as a logical extension of the "consumerization" of Information Technology ("IT") trend that has been swee... Read More...

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And once again, I'd like to thank all of these companies and their executives for taking the time to share with us their vision and predictions of where this technology and where the market is headed throughout 2012.