Down here in the DatacenterDynamics editorial bullpen we had a long a hard debate about whether or not to produce a set of predictions for 2015 since DCD intelligence had announced it was doing so and they would be worth waiting for. However some of our readers decided to send us their thoughts and so, here they are.

We are now on our holiday break and will return with daily news on the 5th January. Our weekly SE Asian and UK and Ireland weekly updates return from the 14th January. Happy holidays!

Security & Privacy Take Center Stage
Yan Ness Online Tech: “Security and privacy have always been important parts of the conversation for data center and cloud projects, but they are going to be center stage in 2015 in a way that has never happened before. The Sony Pictures hacking incident is going to be a big catalyst for this, because it is such a high profile example of the vulnerability that corporations face in protecting their data. No longer will those issues be limited primarily to discussions of healthcare data or classified government data. In 2015, security and privacy will be a top priority across every industry, and providers who aren’t ready to meet these needs are going to be at a major disadvantage.”

Mike Klein Online Tech “One of the most significant trends in the cloud and data center market in 2015 will be the way companies in industries outside of healthcare, retail and finance will start to incorporate security and privacy into their cloud requirements — making security and privacy the rule in 2015 rather than the exception. In the past, that level of security has typically only been seen in the project requirements that cloud companies and data center companies get from healthcare customers. But in 2015, the expectations and requirements on security and privacy will expand dramatically because companies across many verticals will need to better protect critical information, including HR-related employee files, confidential documents with intellectual property and confidential communications. Our industry needs to be prepared for every customer to have the same standards for security and confidentiality as companies that operating under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).”

Regional Growth in the Midwest
Yan Ness Online Tech: “In 2015, a lot of the growth in the cloud and data center industry is going to be outside of the traditional geographic markets. Yes, there will still be a lot going on in Silicon Valley and NY/NJ and the other top six US markets, but I think the biggest story will be elsewhere. There are a tremendous number of projects in secondary markets that don’t typically get the headlines in the data center and cloud industry, and the Midwest will be a hot spot that people should be watching. Midwestern cities like Detroit and Indianapolis and Minneapolis are getting major investments for cloud and data center infrastructure, not only because of the growth in the local economies there but also because these locations are very appealing for disaster recovery because they are such safe locations to save data.”
 
The Growth of Hybrid Clouds
Mike Klein Online Tech: “Another trend that is going to gather a lot of steam in 2015 is the implementation of hybrid clouds. More and more companies will be looking to extend their internal private clouds outward and integrate them with enterprise-grade off-site clouds from hosting providers—and this process will be particularly challenging for companies that must meet security and privacy regulations like those related to PCI, HIPAA and Safe Harbor. Few cloud providers have experience with hybrid cloud implementations that can meet that level of security and data protection, so many cloud provides will be playing catch-up on how to support this next wave of major cloud projects.”

The importance of enterprise data scientists
Greg Kleiman, director, strategy, Storage and Big Data Red Hat: The line between big data and data will continue to blur. CIOs will look to consolidate and integrate traditional data sources (e.g. data warehouses), business analytics with business intelligence dashboards, and data sets with new “big data” technologies such as Hadoop. New disruptive businesses and market segments will be created through big data insights. New data scientist’s roles will grow significantly including data hygienists to improve data quality, data explorers for data culling, and campaign experts to drive results from data insights. Additionally, the pace of open source based big data innovation will also accelerate and nascent technologies, such as Storm and Spark, will gain adoption.
 

Integrating and processing data
Pierre Fricke, director, product marketing, Middleware, Red Hat: Integrating and processing data will lead to competitive advantage. Wearable smart technology like watches and glasses will take off, expanding the Internet of Things and generating an even larger tidal wave of big data. Enterprises that can integrate, intelligently process and make rapid decisions incorporating these data flows into their business will pull ahead. Technologies required to build the requisite IT infrastructure include cloud IaaS and PaaS platforms to enable a flexible and agile base to develop and execute the applications and business processes; highly productive service and mobile application platforms; lightweight, cloud-based integration technologies to bring these data, applications, and business processes together to work in harmony from a customer point of view; and lastly, business process and decision automation platforms that enable rapid automation and modification of the business processes and decisions necessary to provide a higher level of customer engagement. Just as the hit show House of Cards was a result of big data analytics at Netflix, new disruptive businesses and market segments will be created through big data insights.
 
Business of Tech
Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Red Hat: I expect a frothy 2015, with IPOs, acquisitions and investment focused across all of the hot new areas in enterprise tech. At the same time, I think we’ll see some legacy vendors split and shed parts of their portfolios. I wouldn’t bet against seeing more old guard companies go private either.

CIO to CEO?
Erich Morisse, director, strategy, Cloud Management Red Hat: As technology becomes more and more ingrained in the operation and future of business, a CIO of a FORTUNE 500 company will become CEO.

Hybrid Cloud - way to go
Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift:  One thing we’ve already been seeing is that PaaS providers themselves have been changing strategies over time. Docker did this, instead of focusing themselves on just Dotcloud they pivoted to containers. PaaS providers may have lots of tools and frameworks, but they have longer lifecycle requirements. This is what’s making it difficult for providers who are focusing solely on private cloud – a hybrid cloud strategy is the way to go.
 

The intelligent customer experience
Pierre Fricke, director, product marketing, Middleware, Red Hat: Increasingly natural, intelligent, and aware systems of engagement and or interaction platforms drive customer experiences to higher levels. Higher levels of engagement include predictive, contextual, and timely offerings and services even when the customer has not yet indicated his or her emerging need, but has opted into such advanced services. GPS systems that have real-time traffic, construction, and other delay information guiding people to the fastest—rather than the shortest—route represents an example. Another example could be a local garage that connects a car to an application that analyzes the car maintenance and condition and brings up a list of parts to print on a local 3D printer to pre-emptively repair the car. A third example would be a travel reservation system that alerts you to cancellations and delays and offers up reworked itinerary options to select in real time while at the airport, before the delay is posted on the local screen.
 
These systems of engagement build on contextually-aware applications and business processes. An application or business process must be aware and make the right decisions, deliver the right answers or products, and delight customers and users. The systems of engagement are built on lightweight, enterprise-ready, and productive mobile systems, hosted on cloud infrastructure, and integrated with all needed applications, data, and business decision and process automation services required. This is the “secret” to successful customer engagement in 2015.

Hybrid cloud gains steam
Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift: There is a lot of innovation that’s happening in the public cloud, especially with recent announcements from Amazon Web Services and Google. Enterprises look at this and are very interested in trying out the public cloud and, while these innovations are interesting, some may make a commitment to the public cloud and end up isolating their existing investments, reducing customer portability and interoperability across those worlds. There will be more innovation from enterprises as they want to balance the two worlds – get public cloud and continue to experiment as they move toward a hybrid cloud.

David Egts, chief technologist, U.S. Public Sector: More customers will realize that hybrid cloud is the way to go and will need a way to manage it. Going private cloud or virtualized infrastructure only makes them less nimble. Going public is too expensive and incomplete.

Mark Coggin, senior director, product marketing, Platform: The definition of the word ‘hybrid’ will evolve to mean more than public and private clouds – it will become more common to describe hybrid deployment patterns (physical/virtual/cloud), hybrid service models (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), hybrid architectures (scale up and scale out), hybrid applications (COTs vs. Custom and new vs. Legacy), and hybrid IT provider models (hosters, MSPs and CSPs, on premise).

Bare Metal
Bare-metal will be a key use case for cloud computing.
Bryan Che, general manager, Cloud Product Strategy Red Hat: Bare-metal will become a top-5 target environment for new cloud deployments.

Public cloud wars will continue
Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Red Hat: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will square off in a big way on pricing, service differentiation, and hybrid cloud capabilities.
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The new age of ‘Cloud Sprawl’
Irshad Raihan, senior principal product marketing manager, Storage and Big Data, Red Hat: Cloud sprawl will emerge in 2015 as a major trend in the data center. Similar to virtualization addressing server sprawl and subsequently cloud computing addressed virtualization sprawl, the IT industry will enter the age of cloud sprawl. The combination of affordable cloud service provider services and the rise of the line of business IT department resulted in an explosion of numerous small projects housed in private, public and hybrid clouds that has contributed to a significantly larger risk exposure to the enterprise.

Two kinds of cloud workloads
Mark Coggin, senior director, product marketing, Platform, Red Hat: Cloud workloads will bifurcate into two distinct but related categories. One category will be more virtual machine (VM)-centric workloads that are stateful, require isolation from other applications, can share compute resources but may not co-exist well, are infrastructure consolidation-driven (tens of VMs), and are aimed at applications that scale out rather than up. The other category will be container-centric cloud workloads that reside on multiple hosts, require integration and orchestration across hosts, have resource management as a prerequisite, exhibit hyper-density (hundreds or thousands of containers), and are aimed at applications that scale out and everywhere.

Containers
Container discussions shift from use cases to standards
Krishnan Subramanian, director, strategy, OpenShift: Application containers will dominate industry discussion in 2015. The conversation will move from “Why containers?” to “How can I effectively take advantage of containers to make my IT more efficient?” Instead of talking about the benefits of containers, the discussion will be on the standards that can help organization make their apps portable.

Container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes will emerge as de facto standards for containerization and orchestration, respectively, and usher in a new generation of cloud computing solutions.

Containers move beyond the hype
Tim Burke, vice president, Cloud and Operating System Infrastructure, Red Hat: 2015 will see containers progress past the hype phase to where organizations realize this type of software delivery has distinct needs for security, updates, and content authenticity, validation, and curation.

Next year we’ll see a lot more mainstream activity around containers, and people asking providers “What’s your container strategy.” As a cloud provider basically everyone has to have a container strategy, and a fair amount of skills need to be developed by users and ISV’s who need to containerize their applications.

In 2015, IT operations departments will learn about containers and the technology will scare the heck out of them. How do you manage containerized applications? How do you secure them? What about provenance? [Today, Linux containers provide all the things that developers care about but not the things that operations teams care about. In the coming year, we predict that these apps will go from development to production and it will be a day of reckoning.
 

Linux containers
Linux containers will deliver on some of the original promises of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) but on a more manageable scale. Standards-based composite applications delivered as microservices but stitched together as an application fabric will become production use cases. Orchestrating these applications across multiple hosts with technologies like Kubernetes will allow for a new class of applications and use cases that deliver resilient architectures that are elastic, scale across geographic boundaries, and can easily respond to changing business conditions.

Containers will (continue to) change the cloud landscape and win new workloads Gunnar Hellekson, chief strategist, U.S. Public Sector: Docker has created a lingua franca for application delivery which will force old-school enterprise IT management vendors to compete against open source rivals to make containers useful.

The software defined data center
Software-defined infrastructure will edge out fabric datacenters for unstructured data sets.
Irshad Raihan, senior principal marketing manager, Storage and Big Data Red Hat: The industry will start to see IT departments manage and govern their datacenter services as one entity through software-based hyper convergence of virtualization, storage, network and compute technologies.

VMware gives in to competitive pressure and open sources SDDC technology
Bryan Che, general manager, Cloud Product Strategy Red Hat: In response to OpenStack, Linux containers, and open-sourcing moves by Microsoft and other vendors, VMware will open source a major piece of technology for its SDDC.

Top Infrastructure Predictions for 2015 from Cyan
100G coherent and WSS begin to hit their stride in Metro/Regional and Data Center Interconnect (DCI) networks – driven by increasingly competitive pricing for DSPs and transceivers.
Deployment of white-box and “brite-box” systems based on best-in-breed COTS components continue to gain traction with both carriers and data centers, helping to disintegrate the router market faster than previously predicted.

Go your own way
Hyperscale Cloud and Internet Content Providers increasingly go their own way – purchasing optical IRTUs and dark fiber to upgrade and expand their own private DCI networks.  These networks account for more than 50% of total network interconnect capacity for the first time in 2015 As attention moves from hardware to software development and operations (DevOps), lower cost packet switching in data centers, plus the high cost and complexity of taming scale in the IPV6 Internet, drives network operators to data center hosted solutions, interconnected by agile optical networks.

Top SDN/NFV Predictions for 2015
Virtualized CPE (vCPE) will be the first NFV use case deployed in a production environment, as a means to develop new enterprise managed services/revenue. Meanwhile, more complex use cases such as IMS and EPC, where arguably NFV can have the most impact in terms of cost savings, will likely continue in PoC mode.

The orchestration space will become more crowded as numerous standalone and vendor-specific solutions continue to emerge. Differentiation will increasingly be based on an ability to simplify end-to-end orchestration of physical and virtual resources in multi-vendor environments and across multiple domains.

Carriers double down on data center investments, and new DevOps personnel accrue power over strategic direction. Telcos work on defining new products and services based on Telco Cloud.

As single-application Web 2.0 companies peak, the commoditization of cloud infrastructure platforms like OpenStack enables an explosion of new cloud-based services and applications. Operators and vendors that cannot or will not evolve to support this web-scale paradigm will continue to struggle in 2015.