2013 Cloud Predictions

Here's my quick cloud predictions for 2013:


1. OpenStack continues to gain traction but many early adopters bypass Folsom in anticipation of Grizzly.

2. Amazon's push to the enterprise means we will see more hosted, packaged apps from Microsoft, SAP and other large ISV's. Their IaaS/PaaS introductions will be lackluster compared to previous years.

3. BMC and CA will acquire their way into the cloud.

4. SAP Hana will quickly determine that Teradata isn't their primary competitor as the rise of OSS solutions matures.

5. Data service layers (think Netflix/Cassandra) become common in large cloud deployments.

6. Rackspace, the "Open Cloud Company" continues to gain traction but users find more and more of their services 'not open'.

7. IBM goes another year without a cohesive cloud strategy.

8. Puppet and Chef continue to grow presence but Cfengine gets a resurgence in mindshare.

9. Cloud Bees, Rightscale, Canonical, Inktank, Enstratus, Piston Cloud, PagerDuty, Nebula and Gigaspaces are all acquired.

10. Eucalyptus sunsets native storage solutions and adopts OpenStack solutions.

11. VMware solution dominates over other CloudFoundry vendors.

12. Cloud 'cost control' vendors (Newvem, Cloudyn, Cloud Cruiser, Amysta, Cloudability, Raveld, CloudCheckR, Teevity, etc.) find the space too crowded and begin shifting focus.

13. PaaS solutions begin to look more and more like orchestration solutions with capabilities to leverages SDN, provisioned IOPS, IAM and autonomic features. Middleware vendors that don't offer open source solutions lose significant market share in cloud.

14. Microsoft's server-side OS refresh opens the door to more HyperV and private cloud.

15. Microsoft, Amazon and Google pull away from the pack in the public cloud while Dell, HP, AT&T and others grow their footprint but suffer growing pains (aka, outages).

16. Netflix funds and spins out a cloud automation company.

17. Red Hat focuses on the basics, mainly integrating/extending existing product lines with a continued emphasis on OpenStack.

18. Accenture remains largely absent from the cloud, leaving Capgemini and major off-shore companies to take the revenue lead.

19. EMC will continue to thrive: it's even easier to be sloppy with storage usage in the cloud and users realize it isn't 'all commodity hardware'.

20. In 2013, we'll see another talent war. It won't be as bad as dot-com, but talent will be tight.

I try to keep my predictions upbeat and avoid the forecasts on who will meet their demise - but yes, I anticipate a few companies will close doors or do asset sales. It's all part of the journey.

Enjoy your 2013!
Jeff