I was talking with a colleague from our Australian office last night on Skype and we got to talking about the year ahead. The discussion turned to what the future holds for us at our company and the industry we play in next year. We had a pretty insightful discussion and since my job allows me to interact with many different vendors, partners, and customers, I wanted to share my insights for 2011. These are all personal opinion based on my experience.
11. The big bonus word in buzzword management bingo next year will be “Private Cloud”
10. Consolidation of storage companies will continue… Who buys NetApp, DataDirectNetworks, ExaGrid?
9. Federation between cloud providers will become key… Niche players will emerge here.
8. Disk to Disk to Tape (D2D2T) backups will finally start becoming Disk to Disk to Cloud (D2D2C)
7. The adoption of mixed operations between private and public clouds will still be slow. (Security, SLA management, Federation issues will hold it back)
6. The year of end point virtualization in the traditional View / XenDesktop model will still be waiting for next year.
5. End point virtualization providers who provide persona management, composite virtualization, and content caching will gain ground. (Think Unidesk, Atlantis Computing, Virtual Computer types)
4. Virtualizing big resource Tier 1 apps will make more widespread adoption in production. Resource allocation increases and management enhancements, virtualization powered recovery options, and better performance management remove the final barriers.
3. iWant, iNeed, iWill monitor, control, and operate my virtualization environment and ecosystem tools from my iDevices. (I heart the iPad platform)
2. Acquisitions of niche ISVs will be a hot trend by the larger OEM players trying to polish their “TotalControlApproachforWorldDomination(TM)” of the virtualization ecosystem from the hardware to the app stack. (Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Cisco, etc are just getting warmed up)
1. The teeam that is green will continue rocking on the World Domination Tour 2011 that is coming to a data center near you!