Cloud Computing Predictions for 2012

This past week I was asked by Jeremy Geelan (http://jeremygeelan.sys-con.com/) to make some 2012 Cloud Computing predictions ahead of the Cloud Expo conference happening this week in Silicon Valley. These were a short list because they were being consolidated along with numerous other industry viewpoints. The complete list can be found here. 


I plan to write a more complete list of predictions later in the year, but he's a preview for now (2011 predictions here):


1. PaaS becomes the overhyped buzzword for 2012, still needing another year to shake out competition in the market before companies begin making decisions on which platforms to adopt. Whoever can combine Java and .NET into an integrated PaaS platform, with options for modern web languages, will take a significant lead with developers.

2. Security issues replace downtime problems as the major story for public clouds. The press will claim that this shows public clouds are not ready for production applications, but it actually creates a new level of awareness and round of start-ups with viable solutions.

3. VMware acquires one of the Software Defined Network (SDN) start-ups, creating the final distinction between traditional Data Center and "Cloud" (Private or SP/Public provided). They now provide all the tools (virtualization, security, network, automation) to allow CloudOps groups to be created within Enterprise or Service Provider.

4. 2012 is the year of "Enough VDI talk, let's create a SaaS desktop strategy".

5. One of the major infrastructure vendors combines OpenStack + the major open-source cloud tools (Chef/Puppet, Xen, etc.) into a unified package that can be deployed in-house (Private Cloud), on AWS (public cloud) or on their vendor-operated cloud, allowing customers to actually deploy cloud in any environment.