As the new year is about to begin, research analysts have been peering into their crystal balls the last several months to define the top trends in cloud computing. Cloud Computing has moved from buzzword and hype to real technology in the last 3 years and all the major software vendors are scrambling to provide solutions. As such in 2011, vendors and analysts are expecting significant adoption from companies large and small as cloud computing initiatives receive real commitment in the form of IT budget line-items worldwide.
State of the Union
Amazon AWS is the frontrunner in providing cloud infrastructure with the largest breadth of products and most mature offerings in IaaS. Rackspace and GoGrid have lots of customers and experience as they mature their hosting solutions adding cloud computing features and capabilities.
In the PaaS/SaaS space, just this past year Microsoft released its cloud computing platform, Azure. Salesforce. com matured Force. com, released Database. com and bought Heroku. Google has Google Apps, BigTable, and Google App Engine.
On the Open Source front, Cloud. com has released its CloudStack 2.0 based on Amazon AWS Web Services API, Citrix Cloud Center, and VMware’s vCloud. NoSQL databases abound with Cassandra, Hadoop/HBase, CouchDB, MongoDB, Membase, memcachedb, Neo4J, FlockDB and the list could be much larger….
Trends in 2011
To provide context on the influence of Cloud Computing, Gartner included 5 cloud computing based initiatives as part of their Top 10 Strategic Technologies for IT CIOs and executives at its ITxpo in late October; Private Clouds, Storage Class Memory, Social Networking and Collaboration, Ubiquitous Computing, and Fabric-Based Infrastructure. Just today Forbes released a 14 point list co-authored by Chirag Mehta and Ray Wang where they see cloud adoption moving from “when” to “how” and cloud solutions delivering optimization savings which allow
for future innovation investment.
Chirag Mehta and Ray Wang’s predictions:
New procurement will be replaced with cloud solutions
Private clouds will serve as a stepping stone to public clouds
Cloud customers will start asking hard questions about cloud security
Private clouds provide security and backup to public cloud solutions
A transition from best-of-breed applications to cloud mega-stacks will occur
Leverage of application market places and the ecosystem, System Integrators and Software Vendors, for last mile
Superior user experience and scale will no longer be mutually exclusive
Custom application development will shift to the cloud
Expect Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service to merge
Bet on System Integrators with extensive libraries that move beyond data integration
Delivery of consumer technology features into the enterprise, analytics first followed by mobile and social features
Customers will demand better virtualization technology
Simplification of the overall technology landscape due to the efficacy of cloud solutions
Access of Archival data online will drive governance, regulation and compliance as a core cloud competency
Two weeks back Datapipe published three key trends they expect to see in 2011:
Household Names Will Make Big Cloud Decisions
Enterprise Grade SLAs
Industry Targeted Clouds
“What was once considered an unknown technology surrounded by lots of hype is now revolutionizing IT,” said Ed Laczynski, Datapipe’s vice-president for cloud strategy and architecture.
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