Here’s my attempt to put together the list of things I expect to happen to Cloud Computing in 2009 – kind of natural thing to do the fist day of the year, right?

Overall, this is going to be a year when cloud computing will start rapidly maturing with competition heating up on the infrastructure/platform level, real private cloud solutions hitting the market, traditional applications increasingly moving to SaaS or hybrid model, and browser offline becoming a reality.

Let’s go through these one by one – and go through the IaaS and PaaS markets first.

Platform and Infrastructure as a Service (PaaS and IaaS) markets maturing and blurring.

IaaS is basically Amazon EC2 approach with hosters giving customers the ability to instantiate and control virtual machines running in the datacenter. This is a natural progression from the traditional server hosting model. However, this model of raw VM does not provide a lot of opportunity to differentiate which in turn is leading to higher competition and lower profit margins. We will see more and more platform functionality being added to infrastructure offerings and these two layers merging more and more.

Amazon is clearly adding more and more services besides EC2, and partners such as RightScale are adding automated scaling features normally associated with PaaS.

Even newcomers are now often shooting for something in between right from the get go. Can you tell where Windows Azure is? It is already kind of both infrastructure and platform.

Speaking of Windows Azure, this is likely going to be the year when it will hit the market. Folks at Microsoft are doing their best to make it easier for existing software ecosystem to get in with effectively the same or very similar tools they use today. The sheer size of the ecosystem, and this evolutionary approach is likely to immediately make Microsoft a serious player in the space.

VMware can definitely get into the top 3 as well if they execute well with their vCloud initiative. They would need to make sure that:

• Their hosting partners can compete effectively against Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others.
• This pick your partner approach does not confuse the market, and
• They don’t end up being behind competition by limiting themselves to basic infrastructure only.

The interesting aspect of that is that VMware really has the potential of forcing Microsoft to let partners run Azure. Today this is not the case and the only place where Azure exists is Microsoft’s datacenter.

It remains to be seen whether pure Platform as a Service players such as Salesforce.com (with its Force.com) and Google App Engine will be in the leaders group. They will likely start feeling pressure from the infrastructure level as I mentioned already but it might be challenging for them have the ease of migration and the flexibility that IaaS solutions have.

Also, Google seems to be making surprisingly small progress lately. They have posted some information on the upcoming System Status site and billing/quota dashboard – which means that the beta status is likely to be gone soon. However, their development story (Python as the only programming language and quite limited development environment) and the economy forcing them to concentrate on their core search and ad business are limiting their ability to compete.

Thoughts, comments on any of these?

I will continue with other trends next week.

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Amazon, Cloud Computing, EC2, Force.com, Google, Google App Engine, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, vCloud, VMware
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