ANTenna Blog -- Services

Looking ahead to 2009, there's no shortage of predictions about the technologies that will grab the spotlight. One technology poised to move from hype to heat 2009 is cloud computing.

For small and midsize business, cloud computing stands to be even more important than for large enterprises. Because smaller companies are notoriously more nimble than hulking corporations, business owners can pull the trigger on vendor relationships and make the decisions required to move components (or all) of their business IT infrastructure into the cloud.

There's widespread consensus about cloud computing moving to center stage in the coming year. However, there's widespread dissension the more granular developments to expect.

Managing director of cloud computing and SaaS professional services provider Bluewolf, Len Couture, has these four predictions for cloud computing in 2009 and one for President-Elect Obama.

1. The next big vendor to take a leadership position in cloud computing will not come from the software industry but rather from the services sector.


2. This next phase of cloud computing will be dominated by services provided in a cross cloud approach rather than a single source cloud.


3. The success of cloud computing will cause a consolidation of software vendors in an attempted to build a "cloud" like enterprise experience.


4. Due to the economic downturn, many software companies may fail, which will cause companies to look at cloud computing and to purchase SLAs from services firms rather than buying software from closed source software companies.


5. The election of President Elect Obama will accelerate the positioning of Web 2.0 as an industry based standard.

As you'd expect, Couture is hardly alone in cloud forecasting. Over at GoGrid Blog, Michael Sheehan offers his 10 well reasoned and argued (he's got charts!) predictions for cloud computing in 2009:

1. Clouds Reduce the Effect of the Recession


2. Broader Depth of Cloud


3. VC's, Money & Long Term Viability


4. Partnerships Galore & Weeding Out of Providers


5. Hybrid Solutions


6. Web 3.0


7. Standards and Interoperability


8. Staggered Growth within the Cloud


9. Technology Advances at the Cloud Molecular Level


10. Larger Adoption

As a provider of products and services that "accelerate" adoption of cloud computing and SaaS, Appirio fielded it's own decathlon of predictions for the clould.

1. The "cloud of clouds" will expand, but open platforms will gain more traction


2. At best, Microsoft Azure will be a better platform for Exchange


3. Google increase enterprise efforts and enterprises will embrace Google Apps


4. A major SaaS 1.0 company will fail


5. The number of companies with 1000+ employees and no servers will increase


6. Private clouds will have meager ROI for typical IT organizations


7. Business Intelligence (BI) will SaaSify


8. SAP or Oracle will get into the PaaS game


9. Enterprises will figure out how to use social networks


10. At least one $100M software product will be built on Force.com.

This offers up just a sampling of the cloud predictions for the coming year. This time next year, some of these will look prescient and some idiotic -- count on it.

More From bMighty:

• What's New In SaaS And Cloud Computing


• 
  Beyond The Meltdown: A Look Back At How 2008 Affected Your Business