2010 was a turning point year in the IT landscape – specifically in comparison to the downturn of 2009. Lots of major acquisitions changed the IT vendor landscape beyond recognition, the most notable ones in the Java world are Sun acquisition by Oracle and to a lesser degree SpringSource acquisition by VMWare. Cloud computing has moved tremendously fast through the hype cycle to become a true viable reality with the recent addition Mr. Larry Elison who made a 180-degree turn to acknowledge Oracle wished to be a cloud vendor too.
I was recently asked to give my prediction to 2011 to one the the tech magazine. Even though I’m not a big fan of those predictions, but it turns out to be an interesting exercise. From obvious reasons i chosen to focus the predictions on areas that are close to our day to day life in GigaSpaces such as Cloud computing, PaaS, SaaS enablement, NoSQL, Tera Scale etc. enjoy..
2011 Predictions
Cloud prediction
Hybrid is the Way to Go: The Public-Private Cloud Discussion Isn’t Relevant Anymore
In 2010, IT organizations realized that the cloud wasn’t just a buzzword for the latest and greatest IT trend but rather the future of an organization’s IT infrastructure. The discussion centered on whether a public or private cloud infrastructure would be the best format. The issues of bottom line versus considerations for SLAs, confidentiality, security, latency, responsiveness, regulation, and availability provided pros and cons in each direction.
In 2011, the debate will become moot as the adoption of the hybrid cloud will become more widespread. Organizations have certain processing and data requirements for which they must maintain complete control – the internal, data-center based private cloud – and others where control is not an issue – leveraging the resources of the public cloud. The hybrid allows for both.
Openstack will dominate the open IaaS offering
Openstack is gaining momentum quickly and has a great potential to become the next “Linux” of the cloud (Think of VMware as Windows in that analogy). Unlike other similar projects like Eucalyptus, Openstack is backed by a relatively large organization such as Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, all planning to “eat their own dog food” and use the platform in anger to run their own business. Many smaller IaaS platform providers will either join the OpenStack initiative or seize to exist.
PaaS predictions
2011 is the Year of PaaS
Platform as a Service is the largest growing business opportunity on the cloud. By creating a flexible infrastructure in a multitenant environment, PaaS companies will be able to offer a wide range of services to start-ups and enterprise organizations who want to outsource or “hybridize” their IT operations. In addition, existing Software as a Service providers will leverage their own infrastructures of hardware, software, applications, and processing to outsource the same services to other organizations.
A new PaaS category will emerge – Building your own PaaS
The demand coming from many SaaS providers to offer their own platform to their ecosystem players (a good example on that regard is Salesforce force.com) as well as the continues pressure of enterprises on their IT to enable faster deployment of new application and improve the utilization of their existing resources will force those organizations to build their own specialized PaaS offering. This will drive a new category of PaaS platform known as Cloud Enabled Application Platform (CEAP) specifically designed to handle multi-tenancy, scalability, and on-demand provisioning but unlike some of the public PaaS it needs to come with significantly higher degree of flexibility and control.
Application Servers will Change Their Name to PaaS – But Won’t Change Their Stripes
Many of the application servers available on the market support a limited scalability and work on a case-by-case basis without necessary scalability and the flexibility required for a multitenant environment. A limited number of application server companies, by the nature of their integration partners, will find the market wide open to step up when “traditional” application servers fail.
VMForce Will Fail to deliver on its promise
Salesforce already signaled through a series of platforms acquisitions that its not going to rely on VMware and SpringSource to deliver its core piece of infrastructure. The future of VMForce is therefore remains vague. Interestingly enough since the announcement in April this year VMForce remains in pre-beta stage. IMO this is more to do with the inherit conflict between the two companies. Both wants to become dominant player in the emerging PaaS market. Salesforce cannot afford to be marginalized by VMware who wants to see itself in the center and Salsefroce as one of the many providers on its own stack. With the recent acquisitions Salseforce has all it needs to build VMForce without any reliance on VMware and that’s IMO the only way VMForce could become successful.
NoSQL (+Big Data) predictions
NoSQL will become compatible with SQL
Many of the NoSQL implementations gained momentum as a scalable alternative to relational databases. Most of those NoSQL implementations started as a simple Key/Value store. In 2011 will see a big push toward SQL support and more standard interfaces and at the same time we’ll see traditional databases adding support for dynamic data structure and schemaless API.
More applications will run entirely In-Memory
The emergence of the new Tera-Scale machines in 2010 will enable to store Terra bytes of data in-memory on a single box. In 2011 well see more applications that will run their entire data in-memory.
Real-time Analytics Big Will Replace majority of the Map/Reduce Batch Processing
Real-time/stream-based analytics has to become the norm. No one has time for batch processing anymore. For example, e-commerce customers want to know what their friends think about products or services – right in the middle of their shopping experience. If sites cannot keep up with their thousands of users in real-time, they will lose their customers. Yahoo S4 , and Google Percolator is a strong indication on that movement..
References
- 2011 Cloud Computing Predictions For CIO’s And BusinessTechnology Leader
- 10 Cloud Predictions for 2011 from Forrester's James Staten
- Enterprises Consider Business Agility As A PrimaryDriver Towards Clou
- A Private Party
- Top 10 Cloud Stories Of 2010
- The TeraScale Effect
- Google Percolator – global search jolt sans MapReduce comedown
- Yahoo’s Open Sourced S4 Could be a Real-time Cloud Platform
