The Clouderati’s Crystal Ball: Cloud predictions from around the web

If you’re a regular here at our blog, you’ve seen a few posts recently about our past and present predictions.

Rest assured, we’re far from alone in our penchant for prognostication. In fact, the cloud space seems to have drawn a heavy amount of soothsaying. And why shouldn’t it? Cloud was, arguably, the most talked about, most hyped story in technology in 2009, and one that will remain hot throughout 2010. A considerable number of other members of the cloud community joined Appistry in issuing press releases and publishing blog posts predicting what the industry (and, more importantly, customers) can expect to see in 2010.

We, obviously, think our predictions will be the most prescient . And why shouldn’t we? We went 4 for 5 in 2009. But there were many other smart, forward-looking and insightful predictions this year.

So, in the interest of community and keeping with the giving spirit of the season, we have compiled here as many 2010 predictions for cloud computing as we could find. They are presented below in no particular order, and if we somehow missed yours, please add them to the comments or shoot me a link in an e-mail or tweet and I’ll update the post.

Happy holidays and may the cloud be with you!

Appistry (Sam Charrington, Kevin Haar, Michael Groner & Bob Lozano)

• Market Disruptions Accelerate into 2010: Just as the recession provided fertile ground in which cloud computing could take root, the rebounding economy in 2010 will provide the nutrient—end-user investment—that cloud needs to grow. The influx of buyers will put increasing pressure on infrastructure price points, accelerating the “race to zero.” Within the enterprise, IT acquisition models begin to shift, especially around software and support, demanding that vendors align prices and pricing models against a new time constant, the hour.
• Like the ’80s Sitcom, Cloud Experiences “Growing Pains”: Increasing cloud adoption in 2010, while a fantastic thing for consumers, businesses and the industry at large, puts growing pressure on provider processes and systems. The public clouds, now the home to more and more “real” applications, become a bigger target for hackers, and “one lucky hacker” gets in. Reality sets in and has a bit of a chilling effect, but adoption continues unabated, with consumers largely inoculated by a series of highly visible provider mistakes labeled as cloud failures.
• 2010, the Year of the PaaS: Technology advances, the drive towards increased automation and abstraction, and the commoditization of infrastructure, cement the central role of the platform layer in the cloud stack. End-user awareness and understanding about platform offerings will grow markedly. Expect several high-profile acquisitions as traditional middleware and systems management vendors seek to future-proof their portfolios.
• The Cloud Shapes Data, Data Shapes the Cloud: The ubiquity of highly distributed cloud-like infrastructures, coupled with heightened expectations around application scalability, elasticity and robustness lead to increasing enterprise adoption of non-traditional approaches to data access and storage. Enterprise adoption of “NoSQL” data stores jumps in 2010, and the technology begins to work
  its way into the mainstream.
• Put-Up or Shut-Up Year for Tech Firms. A Bubble Looming?: In 2009 we have seen firms from all corners of the IT arena rush to “cloudwash” their offerings, in part as a result of inflated valuations in the space. For start-ups, inflated valuations means easier access to cash. For larger public companies, stock price becomes a strategic weapon. 2010 will be a decisive year for the cloud economy, in which it becomes clear whether these valuations are warranted by growth prospects, or whether there is a bubble on the horizon.

Michael Coté, Redmonk

• Amazon spins off a private cloud. As part of this, Dave says IBM gets a a cloud, Coté says Amazon partners with IBM or HP (or Snorkle?) to do a container box cloud.
• VMWare ships a private cloud in a container.
• The cult of the physical, a virtualization backlash.
• Somebody buys Rackspace, Microsoft or Cisco, or VMWare/EMC.
• Dave: Eucalyptus is not going to have a business – something is going to have to have to happen. Cloudera will have a hard time.
• On the NoSQL camp in general: they’ll have to take on traditional BI tools to “have a shot.” Matt says they’ll get co-opted by existing vendors.

Sajai Krishnan, ParaScale

• Cloud becomes an action verb – We’ve already seen “Cloud” taken to new heights as an overused adjective and noun. In 2010, marketers will out-do themselves by clouding the landscape with more product names and descriptions. Admittedly, this prediction is tongue-in-cheek, but unfortunately fairly close to the mark. So remember that you heard it here when someone tells you “we are going to cloud it.”
• Virtualization will drive private cloud storage adoption in enterprises. Virtualization has driven huge efficiencies in organizations. The weak link today is the storage infrastructure behind virtualized servers. The need to eliminate the SAN bottleneck and automate provisioning, configuration, management and recovery across the compute and storage tier will drive enterprises to begin to adopt private cloud storage.
• Commodity hardware displaces proprietary storage. In 2010, the theme of “intelligence migrating into software” continues with more hardware commoditization. Just as Linux displaced expensive server gear with its attractive commodity footprint, Linux-based cloud storage will displace legacy expensive storage for the same reason: it gives the user choice and it’s inexpensive, highly scalable and easy to manage.
• The middle tier emerges – The strategic importance of a low-cost, self-managing petabyte scale tier that provides a platform for analysis and integrated applications emerges in organizations with large stores of file data. This middle tier will be the “data net” a “catch-all” persistent repository that can hold multiple kinds of data; optimize for performance and cost; support large scale data-in-place analysis, while eliminating unnecessary data migration and administrative tasks; and enable “cloud bursting,” the seamless ability for service providers to offer spillover capacity and compute to enterprises.

Dustin Amrhein, IBM

• Application-centric cloud platforms: This is something I wrote about earlier in the year and truly believe is necessary for adoption in the PaaS segment to continue to grow. In many PaaS offerings today, things like servers and application containers are the primary resources that users configure and provision into a cloud. In reality, these resources are many times just a means to an end, which is the hosting of applications and services. A higher level of value would be realized if users could define an application along with it characteristics and dependencies and then have a PaaS solution provision the necessary infrastructure under the covers based on the application profile. In this way, platforms are truly rendered as a service.
• Well-defined governance models: In my opinion governance’s role in cloud computing solutions has been by and large overlooked thus far. Governance models, ideally produced by an industry consortium, that provide users with an idea of how governance fits at all different layers (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) will likely prove very valuable. There are many different types of governance to consider when talking cloud including architectural (standardizing on platforms and configurations in the cloud), operational (configuring the cloud runtime to make decisions based on well-defined policies), and administrative (declaring who has access to use or otherwise interact with the cloud). All of these layers and types of governance are important to effectively leverage cloud in the enterprise.
• Application-bound elasticity: Everyone agrees that one of the key features of a cloud is elasticity. That is, resources should be added and removed to the shared pool based on demand. In my opinion any elastic capability is good, but the ultimate is being able to directly bind this elasticity to application performance. For instance, what does a spike in CPU consumption or memory usage on a server tell me about the responsiveness of my application for users? Not much. The spike could be attributed to a batch job running in the background when not many users are even accessing my application. If I were to tell the cloud system to provision more resources when such a condition occurs I may be causing unnecessary resource usage and in effect wasting money. However, if I can tie elasticity to something like request response time, then I’ve really got something. If the cloud platform notices a sustained increase in response times for requests to my applications, more application instances can be provisioned to alleviate the high load. My user responsiveness is improved, and now I’m putting resource and money to good use.
• Hybrid cloud focus: Hybrid clouds have been getting little attention compared to their public and private counterparts, but I feel like this cloud deployment model is poised to make a big splash soon. When done right, this offers organizations the best of both worlds in that they can leverage services and resources from both the public and private clouds as appropriate. I’m hoping 2010 brings about some innovative solutions that help to connect applications, data, and other resources running across both public and private clouds to make the construction of hybrid clouds simpler for consumers.
• Wide-spread industry agreement: It seems like quite a bit of 2009 was spent discussing and sometimes arguing over exactly what does and does not constitute cloud computing. While that was good and mostly helpful (I guess), it’s time to move on and focus on helping users adopt the technology. This means understanding both the technological and business inefficiencies that steer enterprises to cloud computing and then constructing solutions that address such inefficiencies. In this respect, I’m hoping for big things from the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council.

David Linthicum, InfoWorld

• Rise of standards: The development of cloud computing standards and the use of cloud computing standards to promote interoperability was more conceptual in nature in 2009. In 2010 we should start to see some real traction in this area. Many user organizations are waiting on the sidelines for these standards to become real before they move data and applications to cloud providers. Some of the organizations to watch include the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) and committees work within the Object Management Group and Open Group. However, many of the cloud computing providers that are trying to create standards as a means of marketing will abandon them in 2010 or 2011.
• First major cloud computing provider outages: While we did see Gmail go down a few times this year, for the most part we’ve not had a major outage of a large cloud computing provider. However, two things will change that record: the rapid rise of the use of cloud computing providers, and the fact that most of these providers are still testing and refining their platforms. This is bound to lead to one or two major cloud computing outages that will hit the press and once again call into question the value of cloud computing. Despite the outages, cloud computing providers will maintain an uptime record that far exceeds that of most on-premise systems, but you won’t hear about that in the technology press.
• Microsoft will be relevant in the cloud: Most people in the world of cloud computing consider Microsoft a punch line. However, with the rise of Azure and Microsoft Office Web Apps, Microsoft will find itself well placed in the clouds. Most Global 2000 companies, if they are existing Microsoft Office customers, will find Microsoft is the best glide path to cloud computing. Google will continue to dominate small to medium-sized businesses, using its free ad-driven model for delivery of Google Docs and Gmail, with a few larger enterprise deals thrown in.

Mark Anderson, Strategic News Service

• securosis: cloud will keep growing: cloud computing experts note that high-profile security breaches have already occurred. “clouds don’t make applications fail-safe,” says chris hoff, director of cloud and virtualization services at cisco systems (csco). he points to magnolia, the social bookmarking service that crashed and lost all its data earlier this year. “there will be other events like these in 2010, as there were in 2009 and 2008,” hoff says. still, many companies will conclude that the benefits of network-delivered outweigh the risks. “even if there is an outage, it won’t affect adoptions,” says rich mogull, an analyst at securosis, a security research firm. “providers who compete with the vendor [that] goes down will come around and tell everyone how they’re different. there will be some pullback but no dramatic change in adoption of the cloud.”

Dave Simpson, Infostor

• virtualization will drive adoption of private clouds in the enterprise. virtualization has driven huge efficiencies in organizations but the weak link today is the storage infrastructure behind virtualized servers. the need to eliminate the san bottleneck and automate provisioning, configuration, management and recovery across the compute and storage tiers will drive enterprises to begin to adopt cloud storage.
• service providers will start to unify cloud computing and cloud storage. in 2009 service providers began expanding cloud storage offerings. the cost and management efficiencies provided a much-needed storage alternative for consumers, smbs and enterprises. to further drive efficiencies, cost savings and management ease of use, service providers will begin executing vms directly on cloud storage platforms. unifying cloud compute and storage infrastructure will also provide a platform for service providers to build new value-added services.
• the middle tier emerges. the strategic importance of a low-cost, self-managing tier that provides a platform for analysis and integrated applications will emerge in organizations with large stores of file data. this middle tier will provide opportunity for administrators to automate storage management and optimize for performance and cost; support large-scale analysis, while eliminating related data migration and administrative tasks; and enable “cloud bursting,” the seamless ability for service providers to offer spillover capacity and compute to enterprises.
• commodity hardware displaces proprietary storage. “just as linux displaced expensive server gear with its attractive commodity footprint, linux-based cloud storage will displace expensive legacy storage for the same reason: it gives the user choice and it’s inexpensive, highly scalable and easy to manage,” says krishnan.
• opex, not capex, will emerge as the most important criteria driving storage purchases. “management and operating costs will figure much more prominently in storage decisions in 2010. maintenance costs on existing gear will be under heavy review with the emergence of commodity-based hardware storage options. customers will look for a storage platform that is self-managed – including the ability to monitor, configure, manage and heal itself,” according to krishnan.
• cloud becomes an action verb. “we’ve already seen ‘cloud’ taken to new heights as an overused adjective and noun. in 2010, marketers will outdo themselves by clouding the landscape with more product names and descriptions. admittedly, this prediction is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but unfortunately fairly close to the mark,” says krishnan.

Reuven Cohen, Enomaly

• Anytime Data – Real Time, Anytime and Anywhere: As we continue our long march into the world of Cloud Computing and Internet centric applications in 2010 I believe that real time information (data) will be the most important asset any business large or small can have. With the sudden influx of Cloud resources those who learn to tap into this wealth of data and do so the most efficiently will ultimately succeed. The one thing that Moore’s Law and software development has taught us over the last 30 years is the more compute resource we have available the more we use. I see this holding true, except now we’re not limited to any single CPU or Data Center. The future of computing will be about the speed in which we can make decisions (data analysis). This will be enabled by on an endless supply of real time information being gathered by a worldwide network consisting of both human and automated sources. The world has become one giant computer network with the Internet the glue that holds it together.
• Emergent Clouds: As I’ve written about previously, I believe that the biggest technological business opportunities are not found in the established western countries, but instead are found in the new crop of upstart economies in regions such as Asia, South America and even Africa. The primary reason being these emerging economies have large population bases and more importantly they don’t have the legacy infrastructure that most Western economies suffer from. These regions offer in a very real sense a greenfield opportunity. These (fast growing) emerging economies have an opportunity to choose the latest & best technology solutions without regard for how it may effect legacy systems — since there really isn’t any. In 2010 as we emerge from the recession I believe that we’ll start to see these regions quickly become the brightest, biggest and fastest growth opportunities. Help equip these economies and you’ll equip yourself for a profitable future.
• Technological Convergence: Lately I’ve come to understand that beyond just being a buzzword, for me Cloud Computing has come to represent the convergence of many technologies. A kind of technological evolution where many existing IT systems, processes and applications have come together — brought about by the Internet as both an operational as well as a delivery model.

Skytap

• Hype Replaced by Pragmatic Adoption: Many enterprises see the potential of the cloud computing model, but have been trying to understand the proven use cases before taking the plunge. Fortunately, we’ve seen many early adopters lead the way this year and there is an emerging consensus around the top scenarios which take advantage of the scalable, multi-tenant and on-demand nature of cloud computing. These scenarios include: (1) Development and Test, (2) IT Protoyping and Proof-of-Concepts (POCs), (3) Scalable Web Hosting, (4) Email, (5) Collaboration, (6) Grid Computing/Scientific Calculations and (7) Virtual Training. In 2010 we’ll see these scenarios become well-defined blueprints for enterprise adoption of cloud services.
• Moving Beyond ‘VMs On Demand’ to Cloud Solutions: We now see a slew of companies that are offering ‘Virtual Machines on Demand’ for a few cents an hour. However, this still requires organizations to do much of the work to make these ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ offerings available to their employees. Over the next year, we’ll see vendors who offer cloud services as complete solutions win over basic infrastructure offerings. For instance, solutions that help integrate internal and external clouds, provide enterprise single sign-on and security, offer billing and chargeback mechanisms, enable business processes and workflow, and automate complex tasks will prove more valuable to enterprise customers than hosted virtual machines.
• Emergence of Best Practices: If 2009 was the year of defining key cloud computing scenarios, 2010 will be the year of best practices. As more and more IT practitioners gain experience with cloud services, this knowledge will disseminate in the industry and best practices around security, networking, ‘hybrid clouds’, application architecture and IT policies will become widespread. This will also include best practices around negotiating service level agreements (SLAs) (both internal and external) and contracts.
• Cloud Consolidation and Brokerage: As more and more enterprises adopt cloud solutions, we’ll see vendors differentiate on support and services, enterprise integration and pricing models, performance and SLAs. In tandem with vendors differentiating their offerings, we’ll start to see some consolidation in the industry as major vendors look to build out a portfolio of offerings that can be leveraged through their existing channels and sales organizations. Finally, it’s likely that some early cloud service brokers will gain traction to shield enterprises from negotiating with multiple vendors around SLAs, security credentials and pricing.
• The Rise of Cloud Consulting: Given the high interest in cloud computing and organizations looking for impartial advice in the face of a confusing vendor landscape, we’ll see consulting practices built around the design and implementation of the major cloud scenarios. Initially, this will be driven by boutique consulting shops, but by the end of 2010 we’ll see many of the major consulting players offer consulting practices and advice for adopting a cloud-based approach to IT.

Randy Clark, Platform Computing

• Cloud startups consolidate almost as quickly as banks in 2010
• The Open Cloud Manifesto never gets ratified by the market
• Customers use private cloud as a leverage point to architect for management control and vendor choice
• Cloud OS is elusive. Vendor camps emerge and vendor wars escalate.
• Cloud polarizes the market. Go big or go small become service provider and vendor mantras.
• A major VM player merges with a major DCA player.
• Consolidation, consolidation, consolidation is the driving force for customers as they move to cloud computing.
• Public clouds reduce corporate IT jobs and spend. CIOs lead the charge. Private clouds become THE strategic decision for enterprise IT.
• Technical, Web2.0, Corporate, Test/Dev and BI clouds emerge and develop independently within the enterprise.
• Clusters, Grids, Clouds, Whatever. Marketers waste 50% of their time equally on defining or redefining the next evolution of distributed, no I mean utility, no I mean commodity, no I mean elastic computing…….

Chris Collins, Yankee Group

• Cloudy IT sparks demand for clear management tools. One in three businesses will invest in a new class of cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) tools to manage hybrid IT infrastructures of physical and virtual assets.
• Enterprise trust lifts telcos to the top of the cloud. Service outages from Amazon, Google and others made clear that many cloud services aren’t yet up to par. Telcos will become trusted intermediaries between disparate cloud environments, offering service delivery, SLAs, federation, orchestration, security and more.

Elastra

• Microsoft Enters PaaS Market: With the introduction of Azure and SQL Server Modeling Microsoft will enter the platform-as-a-service market as a competitor to Google’s App Engine.
• Cisco to aggressively and successfully push into the marketplace with their UCS platform and associated partnerships and help companies build private compute clouds displacing players like IBM and HP.
• IaaS Market Consolidation: Large companies entering the IaaS market will cause the inevitable price war to capture market share. Many of the small IaaS vendors will be unable to compete and close up shop.
• App Engine Encroaches on AWS Developers: More small, Java-focused developers start to adopt and use Google’s App Engine for developing web-based applications.
• Rise of the Vertical Cloud: In 2010 you should expect to see the DoD and the intelligence community (NSA, CIA, DIA) build their own compute clouds
• Major Security Violation: In 2010 we will see the first major security and privacy violation in the cloud.
• Configuration in the Cloud: Change and configuration management of infrastructure clouds will become the primary technical challenge to be met in 2010.
• Governance: As larger enterprises start adopting public clouds data governance (latency, integration, and privacy) becomes the major roadblock to hybrid cloud deployments.
• Established Data Center Vendor Penetration: Data center automation players such as HP, BMC, CA, and Tivoli make their move to drive their products into managing infrastructure clouds.
• Standards: Progress will be made at the various standards bodies, but the only standard that will gain traction will be OVF (The DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format), and mostly for private cloud deployments.

Appirio

• Cloud developer community grows faster than open-source.
• Cloud standards won’t (and shouldn’t) happen: The pace of innovation is so rapid in the cloud that the emergence of truly open cloud standards won’t yet be possible.
• In 2010 we expect to see major initiatives from cloud providers to overcome Platform lock-in.
• Cloud integration will get an enterprise poster-child: Boomi and Cast Iron have had a fantastic 2009 and we expect one will land a major enterprise customer in 2010 that replaces on-premise integration technology with a cloud-based alternative.
• Google’s investments in its cloud platform will transform Google Apps from a simple Exchange/Sharepoint replacement into a legitimate front end for enterprise applications.
• Enterprise collaboration is a feature, not a business: Standalone enterprise collaboration offerings will have difficulty competing.
• Azure will cannibalize Microsoft’s on-premise footprint at a global account.
• Consolidation: With 2000+ providers, the cloud ecosystem is ripe for consolidation. .
• Innovation will be in the business of cloud computing, not the technology: Cloud providers will become dramatically easier to do business with and new business models will emerge to make the cloud more consumable.

James Urquhart, CNET Wisdom of Clouds

• SaaS<–>Enterprise data conversion practice: All those existing enterprise apps will need to have their data migrated to new SaaS tool; and should anyone actually decide they hate their first vendor, they’ll be spending that money again to convert to the next choice.
• Enterprise Integration as a Service: No matter how much functionality one SaaS vendor will provide, it will never be enough. Integration will always be necessary,
• SaaS meter consolidation service: Provide a single billing service that consolidates the charges of the vendor stable and provides additional analytic capabilities to break down where costs and revenues come from.
• (Cloud) Customer litigation practice: Given the example of Scoble’s experience with Facebook, there are clearly a lot of sticky legal issues to be worked out about “who owns what.”.
• SaaS industry (or SaaS customer) data ownership rights lobbyist: Industry players are going to want their voice in Congress to protect/promote their interest.
• Sys Admin retraining specialist: All those sys admins who will be out of work thanks to cloud computing are going to need to be retrained to monitor SLAs across external vendor properties.
• Handset recycling services: The rate at which “specialized” hardware will evolve will raise the rate of obsolescence to a new high.

Shantanu Garg

• India and Asia to grow exponentially in the use of cloud computing for solutions ( in its various forms : SAAS, IAAS, PAAS) . This should be more so in the SMB areas and the fact that entrepreneurs and freelancers galore will help the budding startups to first go the cloud way.
• Traditional Enterprise Software players will release more and more on demand solution fighting for the market share sector by sector [ read desktop, collaboration, BI] . Salesforce.com to see more competitors round up. Although, its business wouldn’t see a decline in growth rate as well.
• VMWare to become one of the standard virtualization and specifically cloud base platform for the enterprise. This might also boom the use of cloud solution providers like Eucalyptus etc.
• Cloud Providers will see their first really big temp. failures in 2010. This includes security and availability based issues, ( example, like the Amazon outage last year )
• Cloud Methodologies will become more visible with organizations and services companies building “ how to do it the cloud way”  services and best practices[ read enterprise implementations]
• Software vendors including enterprise software vendors will focus more on building applications ground up more scalable [ read : ready for the cloud] link to point 2]
• System Integrators for all solutions to use private cloud computing to lure the quick win for SMBs and finally large enterprises with innovative solutions
• Small and Medium sized enterprises to lead the way in quick Green IT (reducing carbon impact) .  Virtualization and the cloud will be the tools.
• BI in the cloud to become a reality for many emerging countries. This will start to become the choice in enterprises as well