2011 has been another amazing year for all things cloud – it’s now time to start thinking about 2012 and how the cloud will evolve over the next 12 months. Prognostication can be unpredictable, because of the rapidly evolving world we live in. When I made predictions in 2010 50 percent of them happened and I think that is about the success rate we should hope for on these. Here it goes…
1. Complex hosting morphs into Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS). We are already starting to see this trend with the ASP.Net Cloud Sites product we offer at Cbeyond Cloud Services. Technologically advanced companies are looking to simplify their environments and one of the easiest things they can do is leverage the PAAS to do it.
2. Specialization of cloud providers is going to become more important. Instead of selecting a generalist provider and having them host all their applications, customers will be more inclined to select best-of-breed providers (like Engine Yard or Heroku for Ruby on Rails or CFDynamics for Cold Fusion). This trend is being accelerated by a number of providers starting to offer cloud syndication along with the new class of cloud management tools like RightScale and Abiquo.
3. Governments will move to the cloud in a big way. Governments (specifically the US Federal and State Governments) have spent the last two years talking more about the cloud than actually using it. This will be the year where reality starts to meet the hype. Governments are being forced to find more cost effective ways to provide the same services and the cloud is one of the few easy choices they have.
4. M&A will continue to be big. Many of the small and mid-size hosting assets have been acquired in the last several years. This year also saw the acquisition of several of the larger companies in hosting including Savvis, Navisite and Terremark . There continues to be a number of very large companies that are trying to get traction in the cloud (specifically Infrastructure-as-a-Service) among these companies are Dell, HP and any telecom who is not already in the game. With record amounts of cash on corporate balance sheets and many of the larger private assets in the cloud owned by private equity funds, I expect to see a lot of M&A activity this year.
5. Hypervisor will become important in selecting IAAS. Traditionally clients have selected cloud providers and migrated to the cloud with little regard for hypervisor, largely because most cloud providers relied on proprietary technology stacks. Companies are now bifurcated into those that use VMWare and those that use HyperV. In this paradigm, it is important to either support these technologies in your cloud (VCloud for VMWare and DDC for HyperV) or provide an automated migration path to move VM’s from a client site to the cloud (like EC2’s VMDK Import Tool). 2012 promises to be an exciting year with significant new traction and change for the cloud, just hang on.
About Stacy Griggs
Stacy Griggs is Sr. Director of Customer Experience for Cbeyond Cloud Services , previously Stacy was the Vice President of Sales for MaximumASP which was acquired by Cbeyond in 2011. Cbeyond (NASD-CBEY) is a publicly traded provider of telecommunication and cloud services, which has been recognized by Microsoft at its 2009 Worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year and 2010 Hyper-V Cloud Provider of the Year. Prior to Cbeyond Stacy held a series of positions at Hosting.com including Chief Sales Officer, Chief Service Officer and General Manager for their flagship Delaware data center.
Stacy has led several information technology services companies over the last 15 years. He was a Managing Director for KForce a $1 Billion publicly traded professional services firm. At KForce Stacy managed 5 business units that collectively generated $18 Million in revenue and had 140 employees. Prior to KForce Stacy was a Vice President and part-owner of Diamond Technologies, an 80 employee custom software development firm. Previously Stacy held management positions at TMP Worldwide, the University of Pennsylvania, and Humana.
Through his theWHIR blog, Stacy will touch upon sales and service in the Web hosting space, web hosting events, cloud computing and industry trends.
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