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

Contributed article by Peter Elliman, senior manager for product marketing, Symantec

Innovation Out of Necessity

Technology changes every day. As the hype of server virtualization technology recedes (or matures), the next phase of virtualization - cloud - in the data center takes the spotlight.  It's about all layers of an IT infrastructure becoming virtualized.  But you have to be able to walk before you run and more importantly, align technology to business outcomes.  As we speak with our customers, our partners and based on our own experience, ‘innovation out of necessity' best explains what we expect will happen in the world of virtualization and cloud in 2013.

There will be greater diversity in hypervisor market share, which will drive increased innovation and adoption of virtualization solutions

Organizations of all sizes will evaluate and adopt multiple hypervisors into their IT environments. Though the market share dominance of VMware will not suddenly crumble, more customers will adopt multiple hypervisors to control costs or deploy new cloud based infrastructures. This new-found hypervisor diversity will drive new innovation between the leaders in the space as they seek to differentiate themselves and stay competitive.  

For example, those who offer hypervisor point tools for backup & recovery will struggle to compete with more holistic management platforms. The maturation of virtualization demands more capabilities such as support for multiple hypervisors, physical systems, storage snapshots, and cloud-based infrastructures. As a result we'll see many more organizations of all sizes - from SMBs to large enterprise becoming 95%+ percent virtualized and using multiple hypervisors in both testing and production environments.

Another example based on these changes is that SMBs will see a positive effect to their disaster preparedness. Virtualization and cloud computing can work hand-in-hand with a comprehensive backup and recovery plan to improve disaster preparedness.  The new changes in 2013 will be increased ease of moving physical system backups to virtual ones and more easily storing these images for recovery at alternate sites or in the cloud.  Deduplication makes moving and storing this data cheaper and increased innovation is making the recovery of any system, in any location, easier.  The devil in the details here will be remembering to test your recovery assumptions - we've seen this consistently in countless DR surveys.

As cloud solutions continue to be adopted, cloud outages become more prevalent driving the need for more innovative cloud management and protection technologies.

Despite recent impactful and frequent cloud outages in the past year, the trend will continue with more outages in 2013. Even though millions of dollars will be lost, companies will continue to use cloud solutions. The result will be more cautious adoption with greater planning and questioning about how to manage and protect their organization's data. It will become a necessity for cloud service providers to provide more availability and recovery options for data and applications.

For example, companies of all sizes will need to adopt better cloud management tools to protect their data because cloud outage problems will get worse before they get better - infrastructures that have scaled quickly with hand-written code and that utilize inefficient shared resources will suffer major outages resulting in some black eyes for the cloud computing market.

2013 will be an interesting year, and we are excited to see how new innovation within the virtualization and cloud computing markets will change the way businesses manage and protect information. We look forward to a great 2013 and are excited to see how our predictions play out.

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About the Author 

Peter Elliman serves as a senior manager for product marketing for Symantec, leading the marketing efforts for NetBackup within the Information Management Group. NetBackup is an industry leading platform that unites critical information management capabilities including deduplication, snapshots, advanced virtual machine protection, continuous data protection, and replication.

In his current role, Elliman leads a team that helps customers and partners understand how the NetBackup Platform can improve how they protect and manage their information in the event of hardware failure, corruption or a disaster.

Elliman joined Symantec in July 2005 as part of the merger with VERITAS Software Corporation. Prior to joining VERITAS Software in March 2005, Peter spent 10 years in high-tech marketing and management consulting roles working for both startups and larger companies such as IBM and Price Waterhouse Coopers. Peter brings a wide range of marketing experience to Symantec that includes marketing strategy, customer acquisition programs, and online communities. As a management consultant for both IBM Global Services and Price Waterhouse, Peter worked on both IT strategy and business process improvement projects in the US and Japan.

Peter graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor's degree in English Literature. In addition, Elliman received an MBA from Darden Business School at the University of Virginia.