By Mike Monell, Director of Technology
Pulling out our crystal ball the other day, the eXemplify Group tech team sat down to decide what topics are likely to be the most discussed and analyzed by IT professionals. We came up with six we could all pretty much agree on, love to know if you agree.
1. Online Storage Goes Mainstream—Even Grandma Gets It
With no hard data to back us up, we think that the world of online document storage services is still mostly a Geek phenomema. But companies such as: Dropbox.com, Box.net, and Apple will spend a lot of money this year to become part of the consumer conscience and will make the cloud something everyone will be talking about around the Thanksgiving table this year.
2. Cloud Hype Ends, the Work Begins
After several years of yapping about it, cloud vendors finally settle down and stop trying to prove cloud computing is a real business IT savior. Fact is, CIO’s get it already. However, the adoption process will take a long-term “roadmap” and represent a slow, safe transition touching every part of the business.
3. Consumerization of IT and Cloud Converge
The bring your own technology and work remotely aspect of the modern American workplace will change the entire economic structure of the IT Department by shifting IT assets from inside the company to multiple locations, or even the cloud. This trend will keep CIO’s up at night trying to get their arms around issues such as total cost of ownership and security.
4. On-premise Email Becomes Archaic
If your company has not outsourced email, you may be well behind the times. Vendors that provide integration tools to connect on-premises apps to cloud apps such as Dell Boomi, will soar next year.
5. Enterprise and Web-Scale Applications Moving to Cloud Architectures Will Accelerate Rapidly
This year will start the funeral march for monolithic application stacks. Most applications will move toward supporting cloud based service oriented architectures (SOA). The transition of these applications to cloud architecture will accelerate and is planned to substantially increase in 2012 and beyond. This pace of this acceleration will strongly influence the entire ecosystem and will have a significant impact on the infrastructure providers.
6. Hybrid Clouds
Integrated public and private cloud infrastructure will become possible 2012, and many will take advantage of it. VMware just released vCloud Connector 1.5, which lets users running workloads on internal VMware infrastructure slide all or part of those workloads into a leased public cloud running the same infrastructure.
Tell us if you agree. Let’s hear from you! Send your comments to us.