Contributed article by Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO of Bromium

2014: What's a Hypervisor?

What a busy year of cloud we have had! 2013 was surprising because of the staggering rate of adoption of public cloud services by enterprises. No longer is it a matter of "if" enterprises will use 3^rd party clouds, but "when" and for "what workload." The single most important piece of news was the selection of AWS for the delivery of a cloud service by the CIA. No longer can one question the maturity of cloud infrastructure software offerings or their ability to comply with both regulatory requirements and organizational security needs. The days of private clouds are not numbered by any means, but the size of the private cloud market can no longer be expanded using FUD. On the other hand, the revenue being delivered by public clouds such as AWS is staggering.

This leads me to Prediction #1: In 2014 AWS revenue from its Xen based infrastructure will surpass VMware vSphere and vCloud revenue handily.

Ultimately, only two public infrastructure cloud services will survive: AWS and Azure. Hosting providers will continue to serve private clouds as enterprises increasingly get out of the business of owning and managing data centers. Scale wins. What's fascinating about the two public clouds is the different markets they address: AWS today is primarily for consumer facing applications, but this is beginning to change fast. Azure is enterprise focused, and has enormous latent strengths, not the least of which is Microsoft's ability to tightly integrate Azure support into the app developer toolkit, and its appeal to the enterprise .NET skill set.

Prediction #2: 2014 will see a massive increase in Azure adoption in enterprises, for storage and some IaaS, but increasingly in PaaS as Microsoft refines its offering and addresses adoption hurdles. Look for Azure in private clouds, with automated on-ramps delivered by vendors such as ServiceMesh, ServiceNow, Apprenda and AppZero.

PaaS is also seeking an independent existence atop any cloud. The GA of Pivotal One delivers Cloud Foundry in a form that allows enterprises to develop "Internet scale" applications atop AWS or private cloud infrastructure. The very substantial investment in Pivotal and its warm reception from customers are a clear indication of its potential to transform the cloud application development market. However, Pivotal has a long road ahead to convince the market that its stack components are (a) the right ones, (b) relevant to enterprise development, and (c) sufficient for enterprise apps in comparison to the rapidly maturing PaaS offerings on AWS and Azure.

Finally Software Defined Networking - VMware's savior - and its potential to transform the networking industry. I love it for the fact that it is a rallying cry for the vFaithful, and for the fact that it has engendered a fight to the end between the traditional networking behemoths and the software infrastructure vendors: VMware, AWS, Microsoft vs. Cisco and Juniper.

Prediction #3: SDNs will see slow adoption in enterprise data centers. SDNs are already everywhere in the cloud. Mostly fluff.

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Simon Crosby is Co-founder and CTO at Bromium. He was founder and CTO of XenSource prior to the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix , and then served as CTO of the Virtualization & Management Division at Citrix. Previously, Simon was a Principal Engineer at Intel where he led strategic research in distributed autonomic computing, platform security and trust. He was also the Founder of CPlane Inc., a network optimization software vendor. Prior to CPlane, Simon was a tenured faculty member at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he led research on network performance and control, and multimedia operating systems. In 2007, Simon was awarded a coveted spot as one of InfoWorld's Top 25 CTOs.