Will cloud computing finally take over the world now that the Mayan apocalypse is safely behind us? Will PaaS finally be ready for primetime? These and other burning questions are part of the first annual cloud tech future predictions. Let’s look at past predictions and the cloudy forecasts for 2013.
Year of the Cloud—The cloud storage revolution failed to materialize, but with $14.5 billion in SaaS sales (an increase of 17.9 percent from 2011), lots of providers are getting it right.
The biggest news is the boom in enterprise SaaS application adoption. Originally touted as the great leveler, allowing small businesses to take advantage of sophisticated systems hereto only affordable by big companies, the enterprise is dumping its high maintenance in-house systems and deploying a variety of SaaS services.
OpenStack—Who would have thought that IBM, VMware (with its purchase of Nicira in July), Cisco, and practically every other major tech company in the world with the notable exception of Amazon would all throw their support behind OpenStack? While it remains to be seen if OpenStack wins the cloud infrastructure war, given the number of cloud service providers lining up behind HP and Rackspace to roll out OpenStack commercial services, it is not difficult to predict another banner year for OpenStack in 2013.
VCE Vblock—What happened to the much-hyped preconfigured cloud hardware? VCE—the uneasy coalition of EMC, Cisco and VMware—are the folks who thought it was a good idea to sell a million dollars’ worth of preconfigured hardware to a company’s infrastructure team without consulting the rest of IT. As companies quickly found out, there is a big difference between dropping in a rack of hardware and building a productive private cloud.
Neither Vblock as a Desktop Virtualization platform (an idea that barely arrived before it was quickly eclipsed by the BYOD revolution) or as a Microsoft Exchange system has proven to be a hot seller. While the usual suspects are still talking a good game, there is clearly trouble in paradise.
VMware Cloud—On the other hand, 2013 will be the year that VMware finally gets it right after years of passing virtualization off as cloud. Enterprises that have been patiently waiting for their darling virtualization system to add a full suite of cloud features and tools will be rewarded with a system that will be expensive (what else is new) but actually delivers the goods.
Cloud Tools—With more offerings than ever from startups and mature companies alike, the market for sophisticated tools will be heating up as companies realize that they need orchestration, brokering, PaaS, and cloud management suites. There will be lots of activity, new offerings, acquisitions, and, of course, the inevitable hype.
What do you think? This time next year, how many cloud predictions will have come to fruition?
