According to an article published on IT NEWS AFRICA, ith the year wrapping up and companies looking toward 2014, Jay Kidd, Chief Technology Officer and senior vice president at NetApp, gives his predictions for 2014 and the trends that will impact the industry including flash, cloud, and software-defined. He also takes a look back at 2013 and the predictions that came true.

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Kidd believes the key themes that will emerge in the upcoming year include The “Parting of the Clouds” into a Hybrid Cloud of clearly distinguished IT service offerings, and the acceleration in adoption of technologies that have emerged in the past two years.

1. Hybrid Clouds Become the Dominant Vision for Enterprise IT

The tension within IT on moving to the cloud will resolve as organizations recognize that a hybrid cloud model is needed to serve their application portfolio. CIOs will sort their application portfolio into those they must control entirely (in on-premise private clouds), control partially (in enterprise public clouds), as well as workloads that are more transient (public hyperscalar clouds), and those best purchased as SaaS.  IT will act as brokers across these diverse cloud models. This will also uncover the need to easily move application data between clouds and to provision consistent storage service capabilities across different cloud models.

2. Hunger Games Begin for All Flash Startups

The flash market will see increased growth as the presence of mainstream enterprise storage companies validates this technology trend.     The battle between mainstream players and bleeding edge all flash offerings will be won by the ones that best enable customers to deploy the right level of performance, reliability, and scalability for their specific needs and workloads. Growth in international markets will be led by mainstream legacy players who have the ability to deliver and support products globally.

3. If You Work in IT, You Are a Service Provider

As CIOs move to managing a portfolio of cloud services, they will look at their internal IT as one more service option.   All IT owned by a company will be considered “private cloud”, and expectations of responsiveness to the business, cost competitiveness and service-level agreements will be compared to external cloud options.

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