Contributed article by Jim Potter, VP of Product at Hostway

Six Predictions for Virtualization in 2014

In light of a dynamic market with continuous product development and the emergence of new players, here are our predictions for virtualization in 2014.

Windows Server 2012 R2 will level the virtualization playing field: This new Microsoft operating system should draw more MS-based businesses into the virtualization space. WS 2012 R2 closes the gap significantly between Microsoft and VMware, and with the portion of SMBs running Windows, this robust virtualization offering should make a real difference in terms of cloud adoption.

Companies "Second Sourcing" will increase: Businesses may not be ready to switch their virtualization strategy uniformly across their existing infrastructure, but they're also concerned with costs and potential lock-in with a vendor specific technology. One of the potential burdens of being "locked in" with a particular vendor is the lack of ability to customize the solution to meet the needs of the business which may lead to higher costs. Businesses using the Second Sourcing strategy of deploying different virtualization technologies in separate parts of an organization are increasing in quantity and this trend will likely continue to thrive.

More SMBs will use virtualization: Word of the reduced capital expenditure offered by virtualization is spreading. As more businesses learn about its capabilities and savings, virtualization will see increased adoption among IT departments in the majority of companies upgrading their infrastructure in 2014.

Hard choices are coming for cloud service: IaaS vendors will need to be increasingly in-tune to their customer base to further hone their offerings to address the needs of both SMBs and Enterprise customers.

BCDR adoption will bolster overall virtualization adoption. The decreasing expense of legitimate disaster recovery plans will help replication technology adoption outpace growth of other virtualization technologies. While many businesses have insufficient DR plans, the urgency of the message - combined with the growing financial accessibility and the regulatory demands in several industries - is driving accelerated adoption. For any decision-maker aware of the business impacts associated with a disaster, the idea of being back up and running within minutes after a catastrophe will yield traction.

IT knowledge will be the biggest hurdle for virtualization technologies. For many other virtualization technologies, the remaining adoption hurdle for SMBs is lack of IT savvy. True virtualization requires true competency, and paying for true cloud competency isn't within reach of some businesses, especially those who have only one true IT professional. This feeds back into the education idea in general: With so many companies popping up offering cloud, and defining cloud in so many different ways, the concept gets muddled in the mind of the average corporate decision-maker, who must figure out which solution fixes his or her unique problem. It's important to remember that there's order to the cloud chaos. Predictable trends form and run their course; many of them are derived from common-sense observation of the state of cloud computing. Companies' must observe, detect and adapt to the momentum flowing around them to thrive. It's not just a guessing game - there's science to it.

##

About the Author