Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Simon Aspinall, chief vertical markets, strategy and marketing officer for Virtustream
Prepare for the Rise of the Hybrid Enterprise Class Cloud
1.
Enterprise-class
cloud will be critical as enterprises move mission-critical apps to the cloud
In 2013, the main uses of cloud will move from public cloud test/dev and
backup use cases to enterprise application use cases (e.g. mission-critical
applications like SAP ERP, Microsoft Active Directory, Oracle database and
thousands more). Over 80 percent of enterprise applications were not written
for the cloud, but will be moved there to gain efficiency and agility. The
majority of this software will not be rewritten as SaaS applications for years
- if ever. To support most enterprise IT requirements a more capable,
enterprise-class cloud is required. Ideally, this enterprise cloud will combine
the scalability and savings of a public cloud (with shared compute, network and
storage, virtualization of applications and cloud agility, and self-service
capabilities) with the security/compliance capabilities and assured performance
of a private cloud (think PCI, NIST, FISMA, HIPAA, G-Cloud etc.). An enterprise
class cloud must be able to assure the application and user experience of
enterprise IT - which means being able to guarantee application performance,
while still delivering multi-tenant efficiency and cloud self-service and
automation. This adoption is accelerating now with 39 percent of data center
traffic in 2012 coming from cloud data centers (
Cisco
Global Cloud Index 2012).
2.
Hybrid
clouds will replace public and private clouds
As enterprises move more and more data and applications to the cloud,
we'll see hybrid cloud emerge as the dominant cloud solution. Enterprises
already have extensive IT and data center operations (which will be optimized
as private clouds), and will need to satisfy growing user and data demands
(which can be economically delivered from public clouds). They need to be able
to combine and run both clouds, which implies that a hybrid cloud solution will
be the dominant adoption of cloud by the enterprise. In fact, a 2012 VentureBeat survey found that
86 percent of enterprises already use multiple cloud services today.
3.
Clouds
will combine and connect - Community and federation clouds appear
Increasingly we will see wide adoption of cloud technology with hundreds
of thousands of private and public clouds put in place. This kind of cloud
usage implies that the underlying resources will be dynamically used and that
spare capacity will be available. These thousands of clouds will breathe as
they are used. As a result, it's likely that the clouds
will be interconnected by exchanges (via solutions like enStratus, RightScale
and SpotCloud) that enable shared cloud capacity while maintaining performance
and security/compliance. Initially, this will occur amongst groups of similar
businesses (think healthcare, insurance, finance, government and education),
enabling a secure and trusted sharing of resources for more efficiency. Over
time, these trusted communities will grow and form large federations (imagine
all universities worldwide being able to draw on-and pay for-the entire IT assets
currently individually owned). Virtustream expects 10 percent of all cloud
business to pass through a cloud exchange (or broker) in 2013.
4.
Majority
of SAP moves to the cloud in 2013
The majority of SAP ERP applications will be run from the cloud in 2013.
Existing SAP productions can be moved to an enterprise class cloud and run with
40 percent lower Opex/Capex and 50 percent improvements in response time. Business
agility also significantly improves with the ability to seamlessly scale
up/down and offer cloning, training and software migrations in the cloud. As a
result, we expect that over 50 percent of existing SAP installations will move
to the cloud over the next year. This evolution will be further accelerated by
the adoption of SAP's HANA technology, which will enable over 4000 percent
improvements in SAP performance. We have seen adoption by companies like
FCC/Domino, Veyance Technologies and a wide range of others, and SAP has
reported over 400 customers adopting HANA in July 2012.
5.
Hosting
and colocation will fade away and be replaced by cloud
Traditional IT models often move hardware and applications to third-party
premises for efficiency and because they provide management of the equipment by
outsourcing business (IBM, HP, CA etc.). Today a large proportion of IT is run
this way (by suppliers like Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and AWS virtual
private cloud). However, this model of operation does not deliver the
significant agility and efficiency benefits of a multi-tenant cloud operation
(often 80 percent more efficient than dedicated hardware and 30 percent beyond
virtualization alone). As a result, we expect enterprise-class clouds (with assured
performance, multi-tenant efficiency, secure/compliant) to replace the majority
of existing hosting and colocation business over the next five years.
6.
Horses
for Courses - Users learn how to pick the best horse for the race
It's
a simple fact - some horses just run better on certain courses. The same goes
for applications in the cloud. All enterprises have complex IT environments
with many applications, and must decide which applications are most valuable to
run, and in what type of cloud. Enterprises are increasingly accepting cloud as
the new IT operations model. More importantly, when it's been decided that all
environments are migrating to the cloud, IT will have a better understanding of
which cloud (public, private or hybrid) will work best for a particular
workload. This means that we'll see more federated clouds as enterprises will
want to span different clouds with their computing and data, and more cloud
exchanges so that enterprises can try, design and price cloud services before committing
to a large-scale migration.
7.
Open source
cloud initiatives come under the spotlight as users demand more
In
2012 there has been much discussion of open source clouds (like OpenStack and
Cloudstack) replacing commercial cloud software (like VMware, Red Hat and
Microsoft). The open source cloud projects are providing basic capabilities
(interfaces, networking, instance provisioning) that will help test/dev
adoption of cloud technologies. However,
there are a large number of commercial software variants of OpenStack that are
being developed (by HP, Cisco, IBM, Dell...), which will have markedly different
developments and capabilities and are unlikely to remain compatible with each
other. In addition, the open source cloud projects today offer basic
functionality lacking capabilities like consumption-based charging, application
performance SLAs, security and compliance capabilities and a number of other enterprise-class
cloud requirements. As a result, we expect open source cloud use to plateau in 2013,
as enterprises demand more assured performance, consumption based pricing and
security/compliance capabilities. We expect significant adoption of the cloud
to replace traditional IT in 2013 - but more commercial than open source.
8.
Greater
consolidation of the industry
In line with the rest of the tech industry, the cloud computing sector
will see a lot of M&A in the coming year. All major hardware vendors and
software groups need to be able to support convergence (of compute, memory,
network and storage) and software-defined capabilities (cloud, virtualization,
hybrid and exchanges). We have seen IBM and HP make dozens of acquisitions yet struggle to put together balanced cloud offerings/services as
a result. We have seen VMware enter new markets with the acquisition of Nicira,
Cisco begin to build a software stack with LineSider, Tidal Software, newScale
and Cloupia, Dell acquire multiple software businesses, and many other industry
acquisitions. We expect this trend to continue and accelerate in 2013, with smaller,
innovative software companies in management and analytics.
###
About the Author
Simon Aspinall is the
chief vertical markets, strategy and marketing officer for Virtustream. In this
global role, he leads Virtustream's strategic priorities, operates vertical
market/sectors and is the company's chief marketing officer (CMO). In the
strategy role Simon works with the CEO(s) to set and execute Virtustream's
strategic priorities. As CMO Simon is responsible for developing and executing
Virtustream's marketing strategy and driving Virtustream's expansion of its
xStream software business, Cloud managed services and the launch of a trusted
cloud exchange for enterprise-class cloud federation. Prior to his current
role, Simon spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems. He held a number of
executive positions, including leading teams responsible for the marketing of
the Cisco Cloud, Mobility and Service Provider Data Center businesses
worldwide.