I was asked by SYS-CON cloud computing legend Jeremy Geelan to contribute to the lead up to this years Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara with my list of five (5) cloud predictions for 2012.

Read all the predictions here: <link> with responses from some of the industry greats such as Peter Coffee,William Toll, Mark Hinkle, Larry Carvalho, Michael Sheehan, John Treadway,

Here are my predictions:

ITSM as a service

Service management, service assurance and security management to become high on the criteria for the discerning CIO. The period of 2009-2011 saw the ‘race’ to get a cloud product to market, but increasingly the demand-side will shift their questioning from “do you have a cloud offering” to: “how well do you run your cloud”. Cloud vendors will need to invest in ITSM-as-a-service offerings to stay competitive. Because too many vendors are totally reliant on the functionality that comes through from their core technology provider (eg IaaS vendors on VMWare) they will not be well differentiated with their competitors. They will need to turn to service management and service assurance investments to find the differentiation that will be compelling to the CIO. The enterprise CIOs will be asking “what is your investment in ITSM”, “how many dedicated ITSM staff do you have?” and “how many security professionals are employed?”

Cloud based ‘street commerce’

The rapid adoption of mobility and the increased deployment of the NFC chip will see the rapid start of the ‘street commerce’ phenomenon. The digital media industry will drive the adoption of NFC equipped interactive signage and displays allowing users to interact with displays, signs and shop fronts using smartphones. The experience will be enhanced by further leveraging of Bluetooth that will allow for innovations with proximity aware interactions as well as transparent LCDs to animate shop fronts and bus shelters.  The cloud based smartphone wallet will take off and the focus will increase for ‘information personalisation’. (Imagine walking up to a shop front late at night and it says “Hello Jeremy we having your favourite running shoes on special, just tap the picture with your smartphone to buy now”).

As a result of the demand for this level of interaction Mobility-centric PaaS will be a hot market item, In Australia there is a lot of interest in providers of this specialised area. (check out www.blinkmobile.com.au). As the APAC region is currently leading the world in adoption of smartphones and mobility there will be considerable investment in street commerce in this region.

Maturing of the cloud marketing message and the settling down of the hype

Cloud marketing begins to differentiate its message recognising that the ‘go to the cloud’ messaging for enterprises is vastly different to the message for start-ups, web shops, development shops and small business. Whilst the enterprise will move individual workloads to the cloud, the more large scale cloud adoption by enterprises will continue to slow as the realisation that the scale of these transformations will have deep impacts on business models, processes and people. The hype such as ‘everything will be in the cloud by 2015’ will be replaced with ‘Cloud is here and stay and will be more about a business transformation over the next 5+ years’. This will lead to an increased focus on professional services as the cloud adoption process for the enterprise becomes a discussion on long-term ‘roadmap’ and slow and safe transitions touching everything from project management, business process improvement, Enterprise Architecture and Business Analysis. In Australia the data clearly shows that enterprise adoption of cloud in the enterprise has slowed and the cloud bubble is bursting in this space.

Desktop-as-a-service increasingly popular

The low hanging fruit for many CIOs will be to adopt the Desktop-as-a-service offering to deal with the very expensive and resource hungry provisioning of desktops. These multi-tenanted offerings will deliver a standard operating environment through a cloud based virtualised desktop as a service and will include network links, email, productivity suites, document management and identity management. The issue for the CIO around “Bring your own device” will be largely solved as the virtualised desktop strategies will be extended to include providing every device access to the desktop-as-a-service. Also many Australian CIOs having to grapple with the issue of delivering remote access to global offices will find that the cloud based desktops will solve a lot of their issues.  The competition in this space will be around providing these services as a PER USER PER MONTH pricing model and the use of user profiles to offer different cost choices. The cost saves will be compelling for the CIO especially in the 500 to 2000 seat sized organisations.

Private cloud to dominate

IT Managers in the enterprise will find plenty of reasons to support a shift to a private cloud model and the vendors will line up to provide the capability. Whether many of these models are actually cloud will be questioned as they will resemble traditional hosting and managed services models of single instances of infrastructure serving a single enterprise. . The vendors will make money enabling these private ‘cloud’ strategies and in so doing will try attempt to stretch the definition of multi-tenant to mean “if more than one user logs onto a server then we have a multi-tenant private cloud” (call me a skeptic I guess) . The reasons that IT managers will drive for private cloud adoption will be issues of data sovereignty, privacy regulations, security concerns – on the back of high profile cloud outages. Underpinning the move to private cloud will be the existing investment made by enterprises in massive infrastructures making it difficult for enterprises to deal with how they transition out of these models. Understandably in some cases job protectionism is also at play with the push to manage internal private ‘clouds’. In time the larger enterprises will fail to realise the promised economies of scale with these models and there will be a shift to public cloud portability so that the enterprises can exploit the dynamics of data centre contestability and vendor price arbitrage for utilities such as storage and compute.

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