2013: The year of the mixed cloud

10 predictions about the 2013-year cloud computing market are coming! Hybrid cloud, cloud Service Broker, large data and software definition Network (SDN) are all indicative of the major trends of cloud computing market in the 2013.

Industry analysts say the current attempt at cloud computing is over. In the 2013, businesses needed to implement a hybrid cloud strategy that placed some of the selected workloads on the public cloud while keeping other parts running on the internal infrastructure. "In 2013, companies have to be serious about cloud operations as an integral part of IT operations," said John Treadway, vice president of Cloud Marvell, a consultancy. ”

Treadway said he and his colleagues collaborated with many large business clients in 2012. These large enterprises are implementing a blind and immature cloud infrastructure program, most of which are private and internally developed. "They are partly virtualized and even partially automated." But when you start using, you can't find the cloud infrastructure required to request resources and fast provisioning. In these applications, a lot of manual operations are still required. Treadway explained.

Treadway predicts that most of these privately-developed private clouds will be abandoned to support a more strategic hybrid cloud. The new hybrid cloud mixes public cloud services and commercial private cloud services based on OpenStack standards or VMware vcloud.

Forecast 1: Hybrid cloud rise

"I believe 2013 will be the year of the hybrid cloud infrastructure," said Tracy Corbo, chief research analyst at EMA (Enterprise Management Associates, Enterprise Management Association). Current cloud infrastructure outage failures have been exposed. This is a fact that cannot be changed. For the enterprise, they should evaluate the workload on the public cloud. Because the public cloud has a specific risk of running outages and data loss. These workloads should be placed above the more controllable private cloud. ”

Chandar Pattabhiram, a former marketing executive at IBM-acquired Cloud integration company Iron, explained that the division of mixed IaaS (infrastructure, or services) is likely to occur between contract systems (such as customer service systems) and recording systems (such as background finance). At present Pattabhiram has changed jobs to Badgeville company as vice president of marketing.

Mixed cloud deployment is not a new concept. In a recent survey published by Gartner, a market research firm, the hybrid cloud has peaked in the summer of 2011. The report shows that early adopters used the technology at the apex of the advocacy cycle. But after earlier deployments failed, the technology then went into a low ebb. This is followed by a slow deployment phase, when vendors start to launch second-generation and third-generation services. In the end, hybrid cloud development has entered a new phase. At this stage, hybrid cloud deployments become mainstream.

Amazon is still the absolute leader in the public IaaS cloud field. Amazon is expected to continue to receive more than 2 billion of billions of dollars of revenue from the market every year. At the same time, companies that have established long-term and solid relationships with businesses are also launching public cloud solutions while launching private cloud services.

HP, for example, entered the public cloud market in the summer of 2011 and launched its OpenStack-based HP Cloud Services Public cloud service. The public IaaS has some "suppressed" demand, according to Dan Baigent, senior director of business development at HP Cloud services. "We want to see a growth model in this area that will generate enough interest," he said. "At the same time, he believes that HP's long-term partnership with corporate clients will help them move into this area." For companies, Baigent says, the difficulty they face is that it is difficult to support multiple cloud services from different vendors, and a hybrid cloud from the same vendor can help allay their concerns.

Treadway that a large number of public cloud manufacturers will collapse. "It's very difficult to join Amazon now," he said. Because the profit is very small, if you can not provide a differentiated value, then you will most likely fail. ”

Lydia Leong, a research vice president at Gartner, believes the public cloud market will be adjusted in 2013. She pointed out that the web hosting service factory GoDaddy in October 2012 quietly closed its public cloud business is one of the most representative examples. "These failed vendors must not represent the failure of cloud computing," she said. They just show that there is no point in competing in this market for any vendor. ”

Forecast 2: Hybrid Cloud management will be key

Corbo of EMA says that if a hybrid cloud is a selective deployment, IT industry must consider how to manage such environments based on resource configuration, scalability, and performance. "Unfortunately, it industry seems to have been creating the infrastructure first and then thinking about how to manage them," Corbo said. ”

IDC, a market-research firm, published a research report in August 2012. The report notes that the global cloud Systems management software market is growing dramatically. It is estimated that the market totaled $754 million trillion in 2011, up 84.4% per cent from 2010. The two top vendors, CA technologies and VMware, have made significant profits from market demand outside self-service provisioning. These include automated infrastructure allocation and virtualization management for enabling dynamic infrastructure resources to converge and share in multiple workloads and user groups, as well as cloud resource consumption tracking capabilities to support lifecycle management, capacity planning, and fallback.

IDC also lists the other top players in the market based on revenue, with HP, IBM and BMC on the list. More than 63% of the revenue from these companies comes from sales to companies that manage private clouds. IDC predicts that the most successful cloud system management software vendors will provide customers with a wide range of functionality other than self-service portals and automation, and can support different virtual tiers and hardware platforms, as well as different hybrid cloud applications.

Rightscale has a different opinion on Corbo's assertion that management is always lagging behind. The company has since 2006 provided services to help users consolidate multiple clouds, allowing users to view different cloud deployments from a single dashboard. Rightscale boasts a 4.7 million user base that supports a wide range of public and private cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows Azure, Google compute Engine, datapipe, HP, Logicworks, SoftLayer and Tata. On the private cloud side, Rightscale can manage workloads on open source platforms such as OpenStack, Cloudstack and Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus).

Other ventures into the field include Cohuman, Okta, SCALR and Tier 3. Appcore, a cloud services company based in Iowa State Des Moines, USA, unveiled a portfolio of private, public and mixed cloud services. The company's CEO Brian Donaghy says IT professionals who have the skills to manage multiple cloud environments will become popular in the future.

Forecast 3: Cloud agent and Integration Center will explode

Early adopters of cloud computing tend to use such techniques when creating unique new applications. Martin Capurro, the product manager of CenturyLink's public cloud service Savvis Direct, said: "Problems related to integrating legacy systems or cloud-based applications are not urgent at the time." But now they are getting urgent. ”

IDC predicts that by 2015 there will be about 1 dollars per 6 dollars in packaged software spending, and 1 dollars per 5 dollars in application spending, through SaaS (software as a service) mode. As businesses buy more and more applications as SaaS, integrating applications, developing security and auditing procedures, and figuring out how to create business-to-business links that connect to partners through the same application need to be addressed.

The Cloud Service Broker (Cloud service Brokerage, CSB) proposed by the cloud provider itself tries to solve the first problem. The System Integration service and Integration Center tried to solve the two problems that followed. The term "cloud Service Broker" was first used by Gartner in 2009. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has recently defined this type of service provider as "the entity that manages the use, performance, and delivery of cloud services and coordinates the relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers." ”

In fact, a cloud Service Broker is a middleman that aggregates SaaS applications on the cloud, providing customers with a portal that allows them to purchase, access, and control multiple tenant cloud applications. Agents negotiate a good price and offer them to customers, providing a single platform for end users to sign these applications, as well as a monthly bill for the IT department.

Treadway says that as a single integrated platform for multiple cloud applications, there is a growing demand for integration centers. In addition to cloud service intermediaries, it is increasingly difficult for a single enterprise to create an integration center. He points out that this is because many custom cloud applications do not use standard APIs when they are created, which means that connecting them to any other application requires a complex network of connections that are almost impossible to maintain. As cloud applications support more types of devices, the problem is exacerbated.

Almost all of the major IT vendors that set up a large number of businesses in the integration Center are involved in the market. Cordys and Informatica are pioneering companies in the field. "My advice to customers is to make sure they have a comprehensive integration strategy in place, and only create or buy applications that use standard APIs and SOA creation," Treadway said. ”

Forecast 4: Large data analysis tools will be better

Big data will grow larger on the cloud. The large amount of unstructured or semi-structured data generated by these enterprises is prevented from loading into relational databases because of cost relationships. At present, more and more enterprises have realized that large data cannot be neglected.

With ingenious predictive models and data mining principles, large data analysis tools enable users to understand large amounts of transactional data and collect information from Web server logs, social media reports, and mobile phone call logs. Until then, these data and information flows cannot be analyzed by business intelligence tools. Treadway said: "Enterprise users want to have operational analytical data tools, and use these tools real-time access to help make business decisions of the correct information." ”

CB Insights, a consultancy that specializes in tracking venture capital activities, points out that since the second quarter of 2011, analysts have received about $1.1 billion trillion of funds through large data-risk capital financing agreements. These analysis companies include companies that provide real-time data and companies that provide other analytical solutions, such as Metamarkets, the latter such as Datameer.

Established companies have also begun to dabble in the field. Hewlett-Packard, for example, acquired Vertica, a data analyst company in February 2011, bought Autonomy, an information management software company, in August 2011 with 10.3 billion dollars. Prior to HP, IBM and EMC acquired large data analysis companies Netezza and Greenplum respectively. "For our customers, this allows them to understand the information contained in the massive data from the cloud deployment," said Baigent of HP. This is very valuable. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)