Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Jon Mittelhauser, CEO, CloudBolt
2016 Predictions: A Maturing Cloud Market Will Separate Winners from Losers
In
2015, the enterprise cloud market shifted from the early adoption phase
to mainstream usage. Expectations have been raised and 2016 is the
year in which IT
departments split between those offering self-service IT and those who
are plagued by Shadow IT. Simply put - any enterprise IT department
that doesn't offer access to easy self-service cloud infrastructure,
runs the risk of becoming irrelevant as teams will
simply bypass formal IT infrastructure and go directly to the public
cloud. As the market matures, we will see a number of changes over 2016...
At least one more public cloud provider will shut down in 2016.
In
2015 we saw HPE decide to drop its Helion public cloud, choosing to
partner with Microsoft Azure moving forward. This type of consolidation
will continue in 2016. We'll also see smaller players shut down or join
forces with larger players as they struggle
to compete with industry leaders (AWS, Microsoft, Google). To win the
race, cloud providers will start to differentiate themselves based on
technical offerings rather than simply trying to compete on price.
Multi-cloud becomes standard.
As basic cloud capabilities become more
commoditized, enterprise companies will start to engage with more than
one cloud provider. They will do this to bid them against each other or
to take advantage of technology differentiation.
DevOps and Cloud Management tools become more commonplace.
In order
to support multiple clouds and dynamic deployments, enterprise
companies will fully embrace devops orchestration tools (e.g. Puppet,
Chef, Ansible) and cloud management platforms which allow them to
dynamically provision across all of their infrastructure
(independent of whether that infrastructure is public or private).
Google (or Alphabet to be precise) is going to get serious about tackling the Enterprise market.
Up to now Alphabet has been sitting mostly on the sidelines but 2016
is the year that they throw significant cloud services resources and
start to make inroads into the space. This will cause companies like
VMWare and HPE to take notice. Hiring Diane Green
was only the first step in their plan.
All
of these predictions are natural results of the increased maturity in
the Enterprise market. The largest cloud companies will either push out
or buy out the
smaller players and consumers will look to maximize their flexibility
and avoid vendor lock-in. By the end of 2016, we will have a clear
picture of who the players are and what their strategy is.
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About the Author
A 20-year Silicon Valley veteran, Jon Mittelhauser has a proven track record of
building highly regarded technology organizations from the ground up and helping to
architect pioneering technologies.
Mittelhauser is considered one of the founding fathers of the World Wide Web. He was
co-author of the first widely-used Web browser, NCSA Mosaic, and was a founding
engineer of Netscape Communications Corporation. As Netscape Navigator's first
product manager, Mittelhauser led the effort to make the browser a platform by
integrating and creating technologies such as browser plug-ins, Java and JavaScript
that today are still core to the power of the Web within the enterprise.
Most recently, Mittelhauser was Vice President of Engineering at Nebula, Inc.,
leading the engineering effort for the company's OpenStack-based enterprise private
cloud appliance. Prior to that, Mittelhauser ran the software organization at
OnLive, Inc. and had overall management responsibility for the successful launch of
their service in 2010.