2014 Predictions: Rackspace sees growth of specialised clouds

Down at Rackspace, VP of Technology, Nigel Beighton, has polished off his crystal ball and set the controls to 2014. This is what he sees coming down the line.

First off is a subtle, yet significant shift in what constitutes `the cloud’ through the emergence of many specialised clouds. Until now cloud computing generally fell into two buckets: public and private. In 2014, we will see specialist cloud providers start to emerge, targeting specific markets such as local governments, military and vertical markets like finance, telecoms and retail. We’ll also see application-specific cloud-based models, for example, cloud-computing for CPU performance, for high I/O needs, graphic processing and the like. 

“I think we’ll also start to see consolidation in the market driven by the big players changing their business models, with some stepping up efforts to generate more revenue from offering cloud computing services. I think this will mean smaller providers will struggle to keep up with the performance developments and investment needed to compete in what is becoming a utility-based cloud environment,” he said. 

Essentially if they cannot do Infrastructure-as-a-Service then their time is limited. Earlier this year, a company went to the wall very suddenly, leaving its customers empty handed.   This was a huge lesson for the whole industry. When picking a hosting provider, customers need to know that the company can provide the services and capacity they need not just now but also in the future.

He sees 2014 being the year for software innovation as users spend time getting their heads around the technology that appeared this year, such as Big Data, cloud, and wearable technology. He sees this existing technology drive new software development, processes and tools. The conversation will move from what new devices there are to how do we use them, translating to more innovation with software. 

He considers that Platform-as-a-Service is currently much over-hyped, and sees this continuing as industry continues to look to PaaS to aid better development.  However, this is where DevOps will come in as a much better way to aid development, rather than resorting to the hype of PaaS.

When it comes to Big Data, Beighton sees consolidation as the key highlight for next year, with the conversation moving on from trying to define Big Data, to talking about how businesses can actually integrate it into their processes and start to see real commercial value from it.

“Gartner plotted Big Data at the top of its `Peak of Inflated Expectations’ on its emerging technologies hype cycle for 2013 which suggests a tough year ahead,” he said, “but I have a slightly more optimistic outlook. Driven by the availability of high performance cloud computing platforms, major tech vendors will take the time and complexity out of Big Data implementations by consolidating disparate Big Data technologies.  This is, in particular, driven by a consolidation of NoSQL technologies. But, this will in turn put pressure on businesses and developers in terms of needing to develop new skillsets.”

The end result he sees will be that 2014 will usher in new ecosystems of Big Data applications that will deliver clear business value and ROI. Further, there have already been a shake-up and new technologies from the data warehousing and analytics companies like Informatica, IBM, Terradata, and Oracle and this will become even more heightened as the clamour for Big Data insight to deliver ROI grows.

“2014 may not be the year Big Data delivers but it should be the year it matures,” he observed.

When it comes to security he sees a tacit agreement that many traditional security solutions just aren’t cutting it in an ever-changing world of technology innovation. The NSA revelations and general scaremongering does not drive the market away from outsourcing, or from US companies, it drives them into wanting to do more on security, demanding more for their providers.

He therefore sees 2014 bringing continued investment in new security technologies, especially around encryption.  This will undoubtedly result in better security in the cloud and address some of those lingering doubts around the security of cloud-based platforms and systems.

Last but by no means least, he sees significant growth of interest DevOps during the coming year as everyone wants to learn how to be better at delivery and how to be more efficient and optimised on cloud.

“The software market is becoming more and more like the FMCG sector with customers and consumers demanding a much faster time to market for software applications and updates.  This means that DevOps becomes an important business process with developers and IT departments needing to work more closely than ever before, breaking down traditional barriers for a smooth, frictionless process,” he said.

As a result, he sees more DevOps technologies come onto the market, with the cloud playing a major part in the DevOps toolkit by enabling the capacity and agility needed for continuous deployment. Again, the coming of age of DevOps will require a huge cultural change too as the two roles become more integrated.