
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Beth Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.
2013 - Year of the Cloud for Sure this Time
Will the predicted Cloud
Computing revolution finally arrive? Has Platform as a Service (PaaS) finally
matured enough to be widely adopted? These
and other burning questions are part of Cloud Technology Partners' 2013 tech
future predictions. In the spirit of the
holidays I give you ghosts of predictions past and cloudy forecasts for 2013.
Enterprise SaaS takes off - With $14.5 billion in SaaS
sales (an increase of 17.9% from 2011),
lots of providers are getting it right.
The biggest news is the boom in enterprise SaaS application
adoption. Originally touted as the great
leveler, allowing small businesses to take advantage of sophisticated systems
hereto only affordable by big companies, the enterprise is rapidly dumping
their high maintenance in-house systems and deploying a variety of SaaS
services instead. Salesforce of course
has long been a big player in this space, but the Workday's spectacular IPO in
October indicates a bright future. Look
for lots of interest in Microsoft cloud products such as Office 365 and Azure
as companies realize that these are cheaper and more flexible alternatives to traditional
desktop tools. The rapid adoption of
mobile devices in the workplace and its demand for more business customized
apps is only going to accelerate this trend.
OpenStack grows up
- While it remains to be seen if OpenStack wins the cloud infrastructure wars
against VMware, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, given the number of cloud service providers
lining up behind HP and Rackspace to roll out Openstack commercial services, it
is not difficult to predict that 2013 will be another banner year for
OpenStack. Practically the every major
tech company in the world with the notable exception of Amazon is throwing their support behind OpenStack.
On the technology side, more tools and functionality than ever makes the
future of the largest cloud Open Source project ever definitely rosy.
Cloud Hardware Architectures get real - Over the last year or so, several vendors
including VCE, the uneasy coalition of EMC, Cisco and VMware, Dell, and NetApp, have announced prepackaged cloud
hardware stacks. On the surface the idea
is appealing to enterprise IT infrastructure teams unprepared for the cloud
revolution. However, as companies
quickly found out, there is a big difference between dropping in a rack of
hardware and building a productive enterprise cloud infrastructure. Since a primary cloud objective is hardware
and software abstraction, more vendors will be developing infrastructure
architectures tolerant of commodity hardware and supportive of transparent
upgrades.
VMware Cloud
gets it right - All indications are
that 2013 will be the year that VMware finally gets it right after years of
passing virtualization off as cloud. Enterprises that have been patiently
waiting for a full suite of cloud features and tools will be rewarded with a
system that will be expensive (what else is new), but actually delivers the
goods.
Cloud Tools mature
- With more offerings than ever from startups and mature companies alike, the
market for sophisticated tools will be heating up as companies realize that
they need orchestration, brokering, PaaS and cloud management suites. There will be lots of activity, new
offerings, acquisitions, and of course, the inevitable hype.
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About
the Author
Beth
Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud
Technology Partners, Inc., focused
on delivering solutions to help enterprises leverage the efficiencies of cloud
architectures and technologies. Previously, Ms. Cohen was the director of
engineering IT for BBN Corporation, where she was involved with the initial
development of the Internet, working on some of the hottest networking and web
technology protocols in their infancy.