2012 Prediction: Compuware

In 2012, we expect mass end-user adoption of web-enabled mobile devices to continue to drive businesses to the cloud. As mobile web access around the world explodes, businesses are realizing they need exceptional scalability and elasticity for their web applications, as well as the ability to build and deploy these applications quickly. Ultimately, cloud and mobility will merge and become one. Consumers -- customers, prospects and employees -- will increasingly expect to use any of their mobile devices (smartphone, tablet, laptop) to connect to the cloud-based services that they use most frequently. With that said, we have three sub-predictions:

1. If you don’t have the cloud in your strategy for mobile, then you don’t have a complete mobile strategy. And if you don’t have mobility in your cloud strategy, then you don’t have a complete cloud strategy.
2. As more end users connect with your application in the cloud, managing the performance and availability of your cloud service providers is going to become mission-critical.
3. IT will increasingly become a service management business, versus a software management business. This is due to the fact that in the cloud, businesses don’t own software. IT will grow to manage the cloud as part of a complex application delivery chain that supports critical business services. The key to doing this will be to understand the performance of cloud-based applications as experienced by true application end-users.