The cloud will be hybrid.

‘Traditional’ infrastructure deployments as we know them are losing ground to hybrid deployments that include virtual and cloud infrastructure. When it comes to new applications, this trend will only accelerate in 2014. During development, companies will increasingly seek to use Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to rapidly build, deploy, and scale applications.

- Mark Coggin, senior director of product marketing, platform

Open source offerings will continue to cut into proprietary market share
In 2014 there will be more credible enterprise options for open and interoperable solutions. We will also see the continued growth of KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine) and other open source virtualization technologies. We'll also see technologies like OpenStack, which are more cloud-focused, continue to take off.
- Chuck Dubuque, director of product marketing, virtualization and OpenStack

Open source storage will continue to mature and cut into proprietary storage market share.
- Joe Brockmeier, open source and standards team

IaaS adoption deepens among enterprise customers
There will be several factors driving adoption of IaaS in the enterprise in 2014, including the need to make the most of existing virtualization investments. Enterprises have invested a lot in virtualization, but this investment is threatened by newer technologies that may not fall under the same envelope as the solutions they've implemented. As a result, organizations will look for ways to manage sprawl and consolidate their infrastructure. This will cause them to turn to IaaS solutions, which allow them to pull disparate virtualization solutions together in a hybrid and open way.
- Chuck Dubuque, director of product marketing, virtualization and OpenStack

Convergence will lead us to the business-driven cloud
We will see the integration of business rules, cloud management and cloud infrastructure platforms enabling the business-driven cloud (BDC). This will enable decisions about cost, service levels and resource allocation to move up the stack to the business owners.

The BDC is a convergence of three different trends that have been occurring discretely over the past several years - IT becoming a cloud service provider and broker, business demands for more self-control and agility expanding beyond self-service provisioning, and the increased use of business rules management systems to define and describe guidance for making business decisions.  In today’s clouds many of the policies and rules are embodied in scripts, workflows, tools and manual processes that are created and managed by the infrastructure and operations teams. This limits business agility by limiting the direct, real-time control and allocation of cloud resources to business needs.

As we’ve seen with self-service provisioning and DevOps, IT will again need to ‘let go’ and move more control from the IT and infrastructure teams to the business. Directly connecting the business to the Cloud will finally deliver what enterprises have been hoping for since the advent of cloud computing - the business-driven cloud.

- Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat CloudForms

Compute and storage convergence will force the overhaul of IT operations
With private cloud and SaaS environments proliferating in enterprises worldwide, the integration of compute, networking and storage infrastructure is changing the way technology services are defined, enabled and delivered. This will necessitate re-thinking of core IT tools, principles and staffing to support the converged infrastructure.

IT specialist roles and accompanying tools focused on silos of hardware-based networking, compute and storage services will revert to the broad systems approach and IT will focus on delivering and managing user services across the complete technology environment however and from whomever they are sourced.
- Ranga Rangachari, VP and general manager of storage

Open source cloud management will disrupt the market; Monitoring, management, and resource enforcement become even more critical
We believe that open source cloud management is going to disrupt and displace traditional management vendors and startups in this space. When we acquired ManageIQ (now part of Red Hat CloudForms), we committed to open sourcing the ManageIQ code. We’re still committed to doing that, and believe that huge value can be unlocked in this management space in the form of an ecosystem, such as a partner ecosystem for CloudForms, similar to Red Hat’s existing ecosystem of OpenStack partners.
- Bryan Che, general manager, Red Hat CloudForms

As virtualization and cloud architecture deployments continue to grow through 2014, monitoring, management and resource enforcement will become even more critical. Before, an application would run on a single piece of hardware, effectively containing the application within its ‘box’. If it didn’t run well enough, the application could then be deployed on a bigger box and there was never any worry about it affecting other systems or applications because of this box.

Moving forward, however, applications running in the Cloud, on virtual machines or in containers aren't confined to one box. Instead, they share resources with other applications and affect far more than just their ‘box’.

To keep these applications and their associated operations running, monitoring and performance tools will be required in the coming year. These tools ensure that over- and under-utilization do not occur, preventing downtime and IT overspending, and that applications only receive the resources that they need, stopping runaway applications in their tracks.

To deliver these necessary tools, a standard, open platform can  provide enterprises with built-in enforcement and monitoring and to connect management consoles to what they are actually intended to manage. In short, system and application management complexity will increase before it improves.
- Mark Coggin, senior director of product marketing, platform

Virtualization will explode (in a good way)
Different types of virtualization will continue to explode in 2014. We'll see the growth of compute virtualization, especially for already virtualized workloads. Network virtualization and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) will also become more popular as organizations look to better handle scale-out data demands. And demand for storage virtualization will continue as organizations manage costs and data.
- Chuck Dubuque, director of product marketing, virtualization and OpenStack

Virtualized power is something that has not yet gotten a lot of attention, but next year it will likely become much more prominent. Like OpenStack - which allows for the computation of networking resources - virtualized power enables organizations to determine where power needs to go, and when. This type of solution will gain increasing traction as it helps organizations be more efficient.

- Bill Mason, director of partner strategy & programs