
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Aaron Suzuki, Founder and CEO of SmartDeploy
Leaving Windows for Cloud Services
We sit in a corner of the IT management world that gives us
a unique perspective. We work with businesses battling the traditional set of
problems in IT management-but our perspective is also colored by seeing
businesses grapple with an entirely new set of challenges, ones that rise and
evolve quickly.
We spend most of our time talking to IT people. So we were
not surprised that the past year has gone roughly the way we expected. A
gravitation toward the public cloud as hybridization has increasingly
become the norm. Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are adopting software as
a service (SaaS) with greater and greater velocity. Enterprises are
rationalizing the balance between public and private cloud. But the motion is
unidirectional: We are all going to the cloud.
Additionally, on the client side, recent
sales numbers from the three leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs),
as of this writing, show an uptick in client computer sales, largely due to
sales to businesses. We think this is driven in no insignificant part by challenges
with the end of life of Windows XP.
The motion of phone and tablet apps as a force in changing
computing and user behavior at work is undeniable, but these devices are slow to
replace the productivity capabilities of traditional client computers. So for
businesses, we believe the moniker "PC plus" is a more precise characterization
of this multi-device era.
Cloud services are a great way to solve challenges presented
by the end of life of Windows XP and the mobility/bring-your-own-device (BYOD)
movement. We predict that 2014 will bring a litany of services from a range of
vendors that effortlessly address these obstacles. The cloud offers a sort of
coping strategy to deal with app delivery and a variety of other legacy
problems associated with multi-generational skips in desktop OS and hardware,
along with the adjacent challenges related to BYOD.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) makes a similar
promise, but falls short of delivering because of its high cost and poor user
experience. This great wave of change in end-user computing is a driver for the
move to the cloud; the Windows XP end-of-life date in 2014 is a forcing
function to that end.
We further predict that 2014 will warm more business
customers to SaaS offerings and we will see it penetrate further up-market. Mid-sized
enterprises will follow SMBs down the path of least resistance, gaining the
efficiencies and capabilities once limited to only the largest enterprises or
the most audacious IT professionals.
The democratization of IT is happening right now with simple,
affordable, and increasingly abundant SaaS solutions for problems old and new,
which make it possible for any business of any size to get the benefits of
enterprise-grade IT management. We think it is an overstatement to say that
SaaS will dominate software spend in 2014, but it will grow considerably. We
think it is fair to say that SaaS will eventually be the only way software is
sold.
Customer objections to the public cloud around trust and
security are diminishing. The increasingly broad adoption of services like
Salesforce.com, Box, and Office 365 are objective proof of this. Because of the
success of these services for knowledge workers, we predict that 2014 will be a
pivotal year that will push any lingering concerns to the margins and broad
mainstream adoption will happen within IT, particularly of public cloud
services like SaaS-based IT management solutions and platforms that can power
legacy applications.
Cloud solutions-whether infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform
as a service (PaaS), or SaaS-are the most efficient vehicle to accomplish the
goals of IT. The cloud brings data center capacity that is certified to meet the
stringent industry standards, helping to ensure regulatory compliance. Business
owners have peace of mind that comes at a considerably lower cost than
operating and maintaining a data center of their own to target compliance
levels. Simultaneously, more and more solutions are emerging, giving businesses
of all sizes more flexibility and more options.
All of these factors will raise the value and acceptability
of cloud solutions. That acceptance will spread and we predict that there will be
some limited EU policy reform by the end of 2014 to help normalize cloud
services globally as a new standard for automated service delivery.
Many IT organizations and their executive management are
re-examining IT priorities. As they do, an increasing number will capitalize in
the coming year on the value and flexibility of a cloud solution to address
both strategic and non-strategic IT.
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About the Author
Aaron Suzuki is the Founder and CEO of
SmartDeploy, an IT management software company based in Seattle, Washington.
Aaron oversees R&D, product strategy, and strategic marketing initiatives
at SmartDeploy. Prior to SmartDeploy, Aaron co-founded Prowess Consulting, a
technology services and technical marketing consultancy. At Prowess, extensive
use of early virtualization technologies, and seeing customers' challenges with
them, lead to the conception and development of SmartDeploy which delivers the
benefits of VDI without a hypervisor.