It’s the dawn of a new decade and the predictions are plentiful across the technology domain with Cloud Computing in a leadership position commanding a good share of the rhetoric.  Much is being written about what the future will hold for Cloud Computing and given that it represents one of the most ambiguous and loosely defined technology areas, it is a fun one to prognosticate on. Predicting the future in Cloud Computing requires some of the tricks of the prognostication trade; be vague and generic enough and you can claim to be accurate after the fact. With that in mind, here goes.

A few predictions for 2010:

• Cloud Computing will cease to be a defining term. It is too vague. The industry will start using more specific terms like Infrastructure Services, Platform Services, Framework Services, Application Streaming, Application Virtualization, etc. We may even see a drift back to “<Functionality Point>-as-a-Service” as a defining term.
• The tools and technologies that implement Cloud Computing from which the benefits are derived will become mainstream. Almost anyone will a desire and a need will be able to create Cloud Computing infrastructure. We are already hearing of large enterprise customers creating private Clouds using the technology to avoid having to deal with 3rd party trust factors.
• The government sector will embrace Cloud computing in a big way, but will drive vendors to adhere to stringent certifications and accreditations. This will make the barrier to entry high for some. The creation and adoption of Government built Cloud infrastructure using available tools (see above) will mute adoption of public and “Virtual Private Cloud” solutions.
• The most interesting trend to follow in 2010 will be the evolution of Application Virtualization solutions. In traditional IaaS and server virtualization solutions, there is still a need to maintain the underlying OS. Application Virtualization takes a server application and builds an appliance container around it to run just that application with minimal, fixed underlying OS capabilities. Ready to eat, instant-on applications.
• “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure” and “Desktop-as-a-Service” technology adoption will continue to languish. As the industry becomes enamored with MacOS and Windows 7 and as personal empowerment continues to rule, the mighty standalone PC will dominate.

Much of the recent rhetoric among the Cloud Computing pundits is related to the need for the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers to move up the value stack and offer applications and platform capabilities. This is true to a point, but only for a specific category of applications. The enterprise customer is not going to be willing to take on another reengineering effort after spending considerable resources in moving to Java/J2EE, .NET, etc. They cannot afford to reengineer again for a specific Platform-as-a -Service technology, but will still want to take advantage of the characteristics and economics of Cloud. There is an opportunity for the Infrastructure-as-a-Service players if they can provide capabilities that allow the customer to reap the benefits of Cloud Computing without reengineering. Current Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings do not currently offer a quick and easy migration of in house developed enterprise applications.

There are however applications and solutions used by the enterprise customer that are well suited to the Cloud/SaaS model. Cloud based solutions that provide xRM, productivity suites, email and collaboration software, endpoint security and configuration management and mobility management are plentiful, robust and mature. These well established companies in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) and Systems-Management-as-a-Service (SMaaS) continue to provide advantages and economics that cannot be ignored for the large enterprises.

The real wildcard in the mix over the next year or two is Application Virtualization. This technology has the potential to allow an enterprise to take an exiting server application and put it in a container and run it on Cloud Computing infrastructure of any type with no underlying resource management overhead.  It will also allow application vendors to offer complete turnkey solutions with no underlying resource management requirements. This technology, while relatively immature at the moment, holds the promise of being able to take full advantage of Cloud Computing technology without significant changes to applications and removes the burden of managing the underlying OS which is starting to be a scaling issue as more and more virtualization is used both within IaaS providers and inside the enterprise perimeter.

In summary, the IaaS players will have to innovate and move to verticals such as the Federal Government to avoid being commoditized and the SaaS/PaaS providers will continue to dominate with established services and continued adoption. Watch the Application Virtualization space for some interesting developments that have the potential to change the game in significant ways.