2011 Prediction: UC4 Software

Mission-Critical Applications Will Start Moving to Virtual Environments

Up to now, enterprises have been hesitant to move production applications into virtual environments given performance and management issues. But in 2011, that will begin to change in earnest. The mindset in the enterprise is changing. CIOs are increasingly mandating that the default position for servers should be virtualized. The cost savings are just too big to be ignored. Second, there’s an increasing level of comfort and success with virtualized environments. We’ve gone through the first wave with test and dev and are now ready for mission critical. Finally, virtualization management tools are now sophisticated and mature enough to give enterprises the confidence to put their business critical apps into virtual environments.

Pace of Cloud Adoption Forces Focus on Cloud Management Strategies

The adoption of hybrid computing environments will continue apace in 2011. However, reality will set in as more customers realize they have to manage and integrate it with the rest of their IT infrastructure. It’s no small task. What they’re going to find out is that they have to work out integration back into legacy environments.  Dell’s acquisition of Boomi and IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron are early indicators of the need to deal with cloud integration. Customers will also need to get a clearer sense of the labor and management overhead it takes to set up and tear down cloud environments.

It’s Time for Service Governance 1.0

Automation is going to take center stage as the shift from job scheduling to workload automation to real time infrastructure continues.  Dynamic orchestration of resources, what Gartner calls service governance, will require an intelligent automation engine at its core. If you think about how the telephone industry started, operators manually connected calls. When call volume grew exponentially, phone companies automated with switches. In IT, automation will be the switch, orchestrating workloads across hybrid environments, operating systems and applications. Service governance, as its natural evolution, will predictively diagnose and trigger resources at precisely the right times, around the clock, reducing manual resource requirements and capacity expense and limiting virtual and cloud sprawl.