Top 7 trends for 2013: T Srinivasan

BANGALORE, INDIA: The year 2012 has been an exciting year for us and if this year should serve as any guide, virtualization and cloud computing will continue to top Indian CIO's lists of IT priorities.

We will also see our mobile workforce continue to expand and companies realize the shift underway towards the fully software-defined datacenter. And, things are going to change even more in the year ahead. Here are some predictions for the industry in the year ahead:

1. Big Data: Over the last few years we've seen a frenzy of interest and buzz around the area of Big Data. In 2012, companies tried to figure out how to deal with massive amounts of data. Beyond the hype, there is a solid base of growing use cases, which are becoming center stage to most businesses.

The adoption of big data technologies continues to grow as companies get their arms around their data dilemmas along with the opportunities available to those that make sense from it all. We believe that virtualization will play a central role in creating that common distributed platform, and we see a growing number of enterprises in 2013 standardizing on virtualization as the platform for their big-data solutions.

2. Networking & Security: The software-defined data center vision took the industry by storm in 2012. It represents a prescriptive model that brings the benefits of virtualization to the rest of the data center. We expect to see the move towards a software-defined data center accelerate in 2013. Networking and infrastructure security represent some of the stickiest issues when it comes to the drive to a more agile data center.

And because of this strong customer interest in SDDCs, the industry will also see more networking vendors and startups modify their roadmaps to steer towards a software-defined networking strategy. We took that conversation to a whole new level with the acquisition of Nicira. As one of the core components of hybrid cloud computing, we took steps to remove 'networking' as the bottleneck behind workload mobility across multiple clouds and organizations will experience the benefits of this next year.

3. Storage: In 2012, the ecosystem continued to make strides with storage technologies to support highly virtualized and cloud environments. At VMworld 2012 we showcased some of our early work around our storage directions including our Distributed Storage preview, and we expect to see more customers virtualize their storage environment and move towards a more policy-based management approach in the year ahead.

4. Management: While VMware and others feel a homogenous environment is the most efficient approach, we recognize customers will have heterogeneous pools of infrastructure...and this isn't going away. The ability to deploy and move x86 workloads between private and public clouds (VMware, AWS, OpenStack and others) is becoming a standard practice for organizations of all sizes as they benefit from the agility, flexibility, efficiency and reduced costs of a hybrid cloud environment.

But with multiple clouds comes the need to manage this multi-cloud world. We expect the industry will continue on this path in 2013.

5. Hybrid Cloud: As the adoption of cloud grew in 2012, our customers' workloads were not only in private clouds but in public clouds too. We're seeing enterprises move to a hybrid cloud model, leveraging and benefiting from reliable resources offered by our vCloud service provider partners.

We expect to see even more customers adopt a hybrid cloud model in 2013 as they see the benefits on offer.

6. Mobile Workforce: We continue to enable the mobile workforce to use the device of their choice while staying productive, and we will see more advancement here in 2013. At VMworld, we spoke about the innovation happening in support of our end-user computing vision including the work happening on the mobile side. The ability to manage a desktop and device will continue to be a hot topic for enterprises next year, as employees are on the move with their laptops, smartphones, iPads and more -and vendors will continue to offer and innovate solutions to address this rapid change.

7. Small and Midsize Business: IT departments at small and midsize business (SMB) understand the demands on IT - of keeping business up and running, balancing IT supply with IT demand, and being able to respond quickly to business needs, are same as big businesses. Fueled by growing demand for business agility and high availability/disaster recovery, virtualization has gone mainstream amongst small and midsize business.  The challenge SMBs face is to do it all with a small team.  In 2013 advances in cloud-based management solutions will make it even easier for companies to solve these problems and focus on growing their business.

We've had a great 2012 and I'm even more optimistic and excited about what's ahead in 2013 as VMware and our partners build on our successes in year gone by - and help our customers benefit.