What trends should we expect to see next year in the cloud computing industry? Here’s a brief overview of what some experts have to say:
- Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale: “2012 was the year that cloud adoption passed the point of no return for most businesses. In 2013, we’ll see businesses focus on managing all their usage effectively across multiple cloud providers, and companies big and small will take a cloud-first approach to IT.”
- Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer at ShoreTel: “With the emergence of cloud-based [unified communications], adoption of hybrid solutions encompassing a combination of cloud and premise will significantly increase. In the next few years, we’ll see additional applications, such as voicemail transcription and email-based fax services, available as cloud services. Vendors that that offer hybrid solutions in 2013 will be better positioned for growth.”
- The Red Hat storage team: “The emerging area of big data alone has more than 100 distinct open source ‘big data’ projects with thousands of software developers contributing code, enhancing features, and increasing stability. It is hard to match this pace of innovation when software is being written within a vendor’s four walls. We predict enterprises will gravitate toward the open source approach to solving real-world storage challenges. Projects including GlusterFS, ceph, Apache Hadoop, and MongoDB already see an uptick in community involvement and enterprise adoption. And, we anticipate this trend will continue unabated in 2013.”
