Contributed article by Giridhar LV, head of VMUnify

Three cloud predictions for 2014

My three predictions for 2014 are:

1. Cloud Platform Consolidation: This is the beginning of the consolidation around the following three as the platforms of choice for the Infrastructure offerings in an Enterprise and Service Provider world:
1. VMware vCloud Director / vCloud Automation Center  - The existing VMware deployments will slowly start migrating to using the Cloud Management tools from VMware
2. Microsoft Hyper-V/SCVMM/AzurePack - A new credible alternative with SCVMM 2012 R2, same or better features when compared to v5.5 from VMware
3. Openstack - The conversation is now no longer about difficult it is to implement Openstack, instead it is about how it can be customized to solve business problems


2. Public Clouds go local and global: While Amazon will continue its growth; Azure, Google, HP etc., will continue to gain traction. However, this doesn't mean that the Local Service Providers will lose; they will also continue to gain traction, this will be due to their ability to provide the better service and an assurance on where the customer data will stay.


3. Shadow IT shows the way: Enterprises will seriously start evaluating on whether they need to run their own data centers. An enterprise will start classifying its workloads into Dev/Test and Production. The Enterprise IT teams will probably use different Service Providers to host these different workloads, the road shown by Shadow IT will become main stream.

And before I end, I want to revisit my prediction for 2013: http://vmblog.com/archive/2012/11/15/vmunify-2013-predictions-iaas-going-beyond-virtual-server-templates.aspx#.UqhCgfT7v4A.  Well, many Cloud Platform vendors and Cloud Providers have begun offering more than just IaaS templates, we'll be offering one too shortly.

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