On 31st December, 2008, I looked back at the year and offered my take on two of the most important events in the year that just ended. In this post, I will offer my predictions for this year. I have already offered my predictions to Jeremy Geelan of Sys-Con Media. In this post, I will expand further on what I expect to happen in the field of Cloud Computing this year.
On the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) side, I expect a strong push towards enterprises. As I mentioned to the Sys-Con Media, this will be due to two reasons. One is the proliferation of the so
called private clouds, cloud like architectures inside the firewall.
The second, and most important, reason will be the confidence gained by the
enterprises on the security of the clouds. The support services offered
by companies like IBM and the role played by companies like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, will help enterprises trust cloud computing more
than ever. Also, the release and evolution of products like VPN-Cubed
from CohesiveFT and others will help enterprises get better control
over their data, making them more and more comfortable with Cloud
Computing. I, somehow, have a feeling that Amazon is going to absorb Rightscale and add value to their offerings so that enterprises will consider their services seriously.
PaaS will see a surge with Google offering support to more scripting
languages. We will also see an increasing push for .NET platform on the
clouds by Microsoft. Developers are going to benefit the most from such
a surge and it will also have a stronger impact on the SaaS side.
On the SaaS side, I expect a renewed push towards Health 2.0 as the new administration tries to revamp the health care system. Google and Microsoft are going to play a major role in empowering the patients with control over their health records. We are also going to see a maturation of productivity applications with much closer integration and collaboration options. I expect Microsoft’s initiative to take on Google Docs and Zoho Suite (Disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of this blog but this is my independent opinion) to get a cold reception because of Microsoft’s inability/reluctance to end their strong love affair with their desktop based Office Suite. Data Portability is going to be the most vocal demand from the
consumers as they realize the risks associated with the data being
locked into third party servers.
In short, this year is going to be the beginning of a big time adaption of Cloud Computing by the enterprises. On the consumer side, users are going to trust Cloud vendors more than ever and start putting their data on the Clouds without worrying much about the security and privacy concerns. Overall, a very interesting year in the field of Cloud Computing.
