2010 Prediction: Jayant Walvekar, Persistent Systems

Virtualization has been a boon during the recent economic upheavals, and enterprises who have adopted it have reaped the benefits. Moving forward, in 2010 the adoption of virtualization will further accelerate. Traditionally, the largest enterprises have been the principle adopters of virtualization technology, but in 2010, SMBs will embrace the trend and have their turn. The drivers of virtualization adoption will continue to be cost, utilization, power-saving, disaster recovery, and the agility it provides. Disaster Recovery (DR) using virtualization will be a strong attraction for SMBs to move to virtualization, as the cost of DR using physical infrastructure becomes prohibitively high.

Enterprises who have enabled server consolidation will aim for automation to improve manageability, resilience, the server-to-administrator ratio, and extract further value from their investments. Those who have not yet done server consolidation will seriously consider it as they struggle with issues of reducing IT budgets, escalating cooling and power costs, and overall manageability.

Hardware advancements will simplify and help increase the penetration of virtualization. Storage and network bottlenecks will be addressed by migrating their virtualization-specific processing to hardware. This will allow an increased VM density and to virtualize critical workloads, without taking a performance hit. Enterprises will take mission-critical applications to virtual infrastructure. This would mean increased utilization and better ROI for virtualization investments.

Environmental awareness will increase among organizations and virtualization will appear high on their list of initiatives to demonstrate their commitment to social and environmental concerns. Charity begins at home and as a part of our green initiative, Persistent Systems is one of the few leading software product development companies to have launched their critical ERP system in a fully virtualized environment this year. Aided by genuine concerns and technological advancements, we expect this trend to increase in 2010.

Vendors

Expect Microsoft to gain further ground in 2010, and their presence will predominantly be seen in the SMB space. Additionally, vendors like Citrix and Oracle will also gain market share.

As hypervisor gets commoditized and almost free, hypervisor companies will push further into the management tools space, bringing pressure to small management tools start-up companies. We envision that these start-ups will either be acquired or will have to innovate to address new issues that are not yet on the radar of big vendors.

Other growth areas for hypervisor companies will be cloud infrastructure and delivering new tools on top of their hypervisor offering. We also expect some of these vendors to move independently or as a joint venture to provide cloud services, even though it may conflict with some of their customer base.

Cloud Computing

Virtualization is the underlying technology and driving force behind most of the cloud offerings. Though Cloud Computing will continue to create a buzz, do not expect wide-spread adoption in 2010. Small organizations will start using public clouds for cost and flexibility reasons.  However, issues of data security and SLA performance will hold enterprises from moving to public cloud infrastructure for some time. Enterprises will, however, prefer applications that are cloud enabled for internal deployment, as this will help them evaluate and provide a transition path to a cloud environment over the next few years. In sum, private clouds will be deployed, but only by a few, large enterprises that can afford it, without having the economies of scale offered by public clouds.

Problems and Opportunities