Interesting! You can now buy up to 16 TB of storage from Google. Read more below.
Top Five Cloud Predictions for 2011
By Matt McAdams
TrackVia CEO
1) Google will launch a CRM. Google dominates the SaaS market for individual, business-user productivity software: email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. Google has 25 million active users of its Apps suite, and it’s innovating faster than anyone else (if you haven’t tried these products lately, you need to see what you’re missing). Meanwhile, Salesforce.com has only 2 million users of its cloud CRM, but generates more than twice the revenue that Google Apps does, based on both companies’ public statements – with a product whose UI looks like Yahoo circa 2003. If the search giant has the appetite to sell eBooks and build self-driving cars, they’ll certainly be itching to goose their business apps revenue by launching a CRM that’s cleverly integrated with their email and productivity apps in ways only Google can pull off.
2) Microsoft will launch simple virtual Windows servers. The bread and butter product of cloud infrastructure is virtual servers. In the Linux space, Amazon is running away with the market, with low pricing and a steady stream of innovative new features. Amazon’s brand in this space is on the verge of becoming insurmountable. By contrast, the virtual Windows server space is fragmented, with hundreds of mom and pop vendors providing an uneven customer experience. Microsoft’s Azure platform doesn’t help – it’s complex, and the strategy has been uneven. In 2011 the desktop OS giant will realize this, and offer a virtual Windows server service for that makes hosting a .NET web app as simple for the millions of Windows developers out there as Amazon makes hosting a LAMP web app for the Linux crowd.
3) The first major cloud security breech will make headlines. We’re used to seeing these headlines once a year in the non-cloud world: a Los Alamos laptop goes missing, or 13 million credit cards numbers are compromised. But no major cloud vendor like Google, Amazon, or Salesforce.com has had the misfortune of a major embarrassment. Cloud vendors are as a rule more secure than non-cloud companies, because they make it their business to be so. But human weaknesses still exist, and social engineering vulnerabilities cut across industries. 2011 will be the year we see our first shocking cloud security headline.
4) Cloud standards acronyms will proliferate and drive us insane. As cloud infrastructure adoption continues to grow, vendors, industry consortiums, and other do-gooders will propose competing standards that aim to commonize the description, provisioning, and management of cloud services. We already have OpenStack, the Open Cloud Computing Interface, the Open Cloud Consortium (I’m going to switch to acronyms now to save trees), OVF, OCSI, CDMI, ECLC, and more. It will get worse before it gets better. In 2011, all we’ll remember is WTF until history sorts out the good from the bad.
5) Platform as a service will become a mainstream business tool. Platform as a service is a step up the food chain from infrastructure as a service. PaaS products provide the components that developers need to build cloud apps: data storage, a business logic or programming language layer, and user interface tools. But business users outnumber developers by fifty to one, and their underlying demand for web apps is driving the development of all these developer-focused PaaS services in the first place. In 2011 business users will cut out the middleman, and adopt business-user focused, point-and-click application platforms like Intuit’s QuickBase in large numbers. (Disclosure: The author is the CEO of one such platform.)
6) Bonus Prediction! The cloud will become self-aware. Well, not really. But I admit I fanaticize about this from time to time. I envision the cloud as a benevolent adviser to humanity, like the sentient network in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. But if it’s like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’re all in trouble. Maybe I’ll move this to next year’s 2012 predictions article.
Microsoft Commercial
This comic has no idea what Cloud computing it, but it’s pretty funny.
Amazon Web Services has a useful blog, in this post they discuss importing VM’s to the Cloud. Amazon now has a product, VM Import, that allows you to migrate existing VMDK files to their service.
Read more from the Amazon blog HERE
I found this article and although its not Cloud computing focused it is about Social networks and how they can be destructive if we are consumed by them. At times the social network world can pull us away from more important things like our family. Please read this article from Nicholas Carr’s blog….during this time of year it’s always good to rethink how we are interacting with our family.
Despite the concerns over security, availability and integration issues, SaaS is continuing to grow as more and more companies are adopting this service method. It is also continuing to grow because more and more companies are realizing that offering a SaaS service will create residual income and its what the market is moving towards.
Read more about Gartner’s 2011 forecast HERE
Phil Wainewright of ZDnet reviews a survey of conservative IT decision makers that view the Cloud as an opportunity to reduce costs and smooth IT operations.
Read more HERE
James Urquhart writes a CNet article about two conferences in the Bay area that were focused on the Cloud. He feels IT vendors might be missing the point of the Cloud. He believes its the developers that are leading the charge into the Cloud not IT operations.
Read HERE
Gartner predicts that Cloud Computing will be the Top Strategic Technologies for 2011. Worldwide this industry will do $8 Billion while the US will do 40% of this number. This is impressive and the industry is only going to grow and at a rapid pace. Gartner predicts that in 2013 the SaaS and Cloud computing industry will reach $14 Billion.
Read more from smallbiztrends.com HERE
