2011 Prediction: CloudSwitch

Have you ever walked into a dark room and started feeling the wall for the light switch? You know that it’s somewhere on the right hand side of the wall you just can’t see it, but you reach out and move your hand until you find the switch? Well that was 2010 in Cloud Computing.  Now that we have turned on the light, we have a lot to look forward to in 2011. Here are some high level things that I  think will happen:

Hyper-V will begin to secure material traction in the enterprise virtualization space. This will put significant pressure on VMware.

Networking bandwidth will become the new bottleneck:previously security was the biggest obstacle for embracing cloud computing, but as enterprises move larger and more production-oriented workloads in the cloud the network will become the bottleneck.

It will feel like 1999/2000 again - remember how the brick and mortar retailers became deathly afraid of becoming “Amazon-ized?”  It’s happening again. Many of the major hosting providers will come to the realization that they have been playing “defense” with respect to the cloud computing behemoth.

M&A activity by enterprise players will accelerate. A majority of the enterprise software, hardware and integration services players have been happily  busy selling “picks and shovels” to the hosting/cloud providers, but they will wake up to the realization that they need to make strategic moves to fill their product portfolio gap.

The big question regarding cloud computing will shift from: “Should we use the cloud?” to “How and When?