I kind of thought we were a little for “10 things to watch for in 2010” type posts but it seems ChannelWeb doesn’t think so and have compiled a list of somewhat conflicting Cloud prophesies for 2010 from some of the clouderati. So without any further ado – let’s hear what them-that-know predict will happen this year and my measure of how accurate their predictions are:
First up James Demoulakis, CTO of GlassHouse Technologies opines that Cloud Storage Adoption will Broaden. Coming from a perspective of technology developments solving security and latency issues – he predicts 2010 will all be about cloud storage. I kind of agree that cloud storage will broaden this year but don’t see that’ll be caused by anything so high level. Quite simply it’s a reflection of a degree of momentum and some critical mass. Any issues that did exist still will. I give this an 80% chance of eventuating.
Hybrid will Happen, says Jimmy Tan, general manager for PEER Software. He calls it hybrid but I’d call it more offline available web apps. Either way he suggests that cloud services will continue to develop “off-line” working modes to complement their “always on” approach. Given HTML5, Google ascending and Microsoft’s play with Office 2010 – I give this a 90% chance.
Platform-as-a-Service Takes Hold says Sam Charrington (a really nice guy by the way) from Appistry. he believes that 2010 is the year that PaaS will really take hold as organizations look at how they take advantage of cloud platforms and push it beyond just requests for virtual machines. I’m not entirely convinced – while I love PaaS as a concept, I just don’t see widespread use as a given. I’ll give this a 50% chance.
Public Vs. Private Becomes Less Relevant says Vanessa Alvarez an industry analyst from Frost & Sullivan (and someone I’m looking forward to meeting at Cloud Connect in a few weeks). Vanessa says that in 2010, we’ll START to move away from these terms as the importance of how apps/services/resources are delivered and/or from where, becomes less relevant to end users and the market overall. I’ve got to agree with Vanessa here – I’m not a hand wringing dogmatic who gets caught up passionately defending “purity” chapter and verse. At the end of the day it’s about results and I for one don’t care if those results are obtained through some sort of “pseudo cloud”. 75% of happening but less if the handwringers have their way.
2010 will be the year of planning for the cloud says John Ross, CTO of GreenPages. Apparently everyone will need to stop thinking about how we have done things in the past and begin to think about how we can do things differently with the resources that are being made available to us. I’m not so sure – I don’t see the world in black and white pre cloud/post cloud terms and I see the planning that John talks about as being more of the same due diligence type stuff that has always occurred. I’m not sold and I give this a 20%.
Cloud Platforms Gain Acceptance opines Barry Lynn, CEO of 3Tera. Apparently 2010 will be the year that the best cloud platforms will be accepted as enablers of mission critical enterprise applications in need of high availability, dependable SLAs and world class disaster recovery. What? I don’t think so. I think Barry’s been drinking the KoolAide a little too much 10% on this one.
Disaster Recovery In The Cloud will be big says Chris Pyle, CEO of Champion Solutions Group. Clients will start considering using the “cloud” as another choice when developing a disaster recovery plan he says. I don’t think so. Clients who already use the cloud will think about using it for DR, those who don’t won’t give it a second thought. DR will stay inline with general cloud adoption – 20% from me.
Private Clouds Die, Intercloud Rises, Openness Abounds says the normally reticent Sam Johnson. Sam’s a strong character and, gets a little passionate about things and attached to the dogma of cloud. I love what he tries to do but disagree with much of his vehemence. When it comes to this prediction, I’m erring on the side of the (somewhat confusingly) opposite view given by Vanessa – public? private? who cares just make it work. 10%
WAN Optimization-as-a-Service Surfaces preaches Adam Davison, corporate vice president for Expand Networks. Where do they get these guys from? Get a load of this: “As cloud-based services become more prevalent, whether private or public, the provision of an end-to-end software solution for virtualized WAN optimization from the data center, to the branch office and mobile users will be paramount.” Yeah whatever dude – just buy some bigger pipes – 15% although I’d qualify that by saying he’s probably got a 40% chance within enterprise who love the big words he uses.
