IT predictions for 2011: Part one
General trends
One of the biggest IT trends will be increased shared services within the public sector. Also to a lesser degree, shared in the form of ‘cloud’ will become more pervasive within the enterprise.
“The effect of the Spending Review will force the government to embrace new innovative models that are currently being used in the public sector, especially Shared Services and forays into cloud and using Software as a Service,” believes UC4 Software’s Craig Beddis.
“Sharing critical business and IT services have been proven to cut costs, reduce errors and improve productivity. For a progressive government this is an obvious opportunity to use these models more and increase understanding of them through pushing the concept of joint partnerships with established service providers.”
“Whilst budget cuts might be inevitable, there are IT solutions available that can drastically increase efficiency,” says Paul Wooding from NetApp. “We will see more flexible IT architecture that is built on a shared virtual infrastructure being introduced. These flexible IT systems help organisations build virtual environments and allocate resources as needed.”
The reduction in spending also means public sector organisations are likely to reduce the number of partners they engage with. Consolidation in the channel is very likely.
Enterprise softwareVirtualisation growth will spread to the SME
If hype was measured on a rating of 1 to 10, virtualisation would easily be at the top of the scale. VMware was one of the fastest growing IT vendors of the last year and 2011 will see an acceleration as the mid market starts to wake up to the benefits of getting better utilisation out of ageing hardware.
As Aad Dekkers from MTI suggests, “In 2011 datacentres will become ever more complex as virtual instances increase in number, demanding more and more utility from incumbent hardware and requiring ever more management resource.”
Dekkers believes that this complexity will force IT leaders to tighten their virtualisation policies and work with people who are certified and focus on a few key vendors. Customers will seek to engage with partners who offer “depth instead of breath” when it comes to solving the mess.
Cloud adoption will increase – but not as rapidly as the hype suggests
Every vendor seems to have a version of its product that’s now cloud-ready. However, for an organisation that already has a solution in place that works and is stable, few are ready to spend more for cloudy benefits that are less than stellar. “The perception of cloud hosting will shift, with an increased focus on flexibility,” says Dominic Monkhouse, UK MD of PEER 1. “Hybrid hosting combining physical and cloud servers will become more prevalent.”
The adoption of hybrid computing environments will continue apace in 2011. However, reality will set in as more IT managers realise they have to manage and integrate it with the rest of their IT infrastructure. “What they’re going to find out is that they have to work out integration back into legacy environments, which explains the big boys’ recent acquisitions such as Dell with Boomi as a precursor of this need,” comments Craig Beddis. “Businesses will also need to get a clearer sense of the labour and management overhead it takes to set up and tear down cloud environments.”
Mobile application management will be a major new growth area
The number of mobile applications is starting to eclipse old fashioned client server equivalents. If you include Web 2.0 applications and social networking, the balance has already tipped. Combined with the prevalence of smart phones, pads, net books and the like, the need to manage deployment, patching, security and content for applications on mobile devices is a huge growth area.
NetworkingTop tier vendors strengthen networking portfolios through acquisition and mergers
2010 saw HP finally bringing its 3com acquisition online, Avaya committing to expand its Nortel-acquired networking portfolio and Brocade unveiled an innovative networking architecture. The year was a bit of a wakeup call for a sluggish Cisco. However, there are still a number of innovative network start-ups that could become acquisition targets as other vendors start looking to offer end-to-end without having to rely on the old status quo. A big networking acquisition is definitely likely for 2011, and Dell or HP would be good players to bet on.
IPv4 to IPv6 migration will begin in earnest
If Y2K panic was, in the end, a damp squib, the idea of running out of IPv4 addresses might be a more dramatic issue for the industry. Few people seem to grasp how catastrophic and imminent it is. Although most modern networking equipment is IPv6 compliant, potential problem areas like security and application compatibility are still difficult to quantify.
Johannes Ullrich, PhD, chief research officer for the SANS Institute believes that organisations have failed to grasp the full impact of a move to IPv6 or the amount of time needed to plan, test and secure any migration strategy. “Many organisations will look at their own networks and not see a big problem staying on IPv4,” he explains. “But say you need to connect to a supplier network in China and they have been forced to move to IPv6 due to running out of addresses, your organisation may have to switch over very quickly.”
WAN virtualisation and optimisation will grow
So in a world with more SaaS and clouds, the network becomes more critical and demands on bandwidth will grow. Throwing more raw capacity is expensive and not always sufficient to guarantee quality of service. New technologies like WAN virtualisation, which aggregate multiple types of IP circuit into a coherent service will be in demand. Although not a new area, innovators in the load balancing, compression and IP traffic management space should be in for good times.
Part 2
