Hybrid cloud deployment is not a new concept. Research published by Gartner shows that the hype surrounding hybrid cloud reached its peak last summer. According to Gartner's research scheme, early adopters take on a technology at the peak of the hype cycle, then there's a period of disillusionment when stories of early adoption failures come out. That's followed by a slow adoption phase, when vendors begin delivering on second- and third-generation services. Finally, there's the phase where adoption becomes mainstream.
Amazon is still the uncontested leader in the public IaaS cloud space, with expectations that it will continue to pull down more than $2 billion annually in that market. But vendors with long and strong ties to the enterprise are all rolling out public offerings alongside their private cloud services.
For example, HP jumped into the public cloud market last summer when it rolled out its OpenStack-based HP Cloud Services. According to Dan Baigent, senior director of business development for HP Cloud Services, there is certainly a "pent-up" need for public IaaS. "We expect to see the most interesting growth patterns in that space," he says, arguing that HP's long-standing relationship with enterprise customers will help it make inroads there. It's difficult for enterprises to support multiple clouds from different vendors, Baigent says, and getting both parts of the hybrid cloud from the same provider can simplify that prospect.
Treadway argues that many public cloud vendors will go under. "It's very hard to play in the Amazon game. The margins are small and if you don't offer a differentiating value, you are very likely going to fail," Treadway says.
Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner, agrees that 2013 will see some corrections to the public cloud market, pointing to Web hosting vendor GoDaddy quietly closing the doors on its public cloud operation in October as a prime example. "These closures certainly don't give any kind of signal that cloud computing is a failure. They simply demonstrate that it doesn't make sense for every vendor to compete in that market," she says.
Prediction 2: Hybrid-cloud management becomes key
If hybrid clouds are the deployment of choice, EMA's Corbo says the IT industry has to make significant inroads on how to manage that type of environment in terms of resource provisioning, scalability and performance.
"It's unfortunate that the IT industry seems to build infrastructure, and managing it is always an afterthought," Corbo says.
