Last month, Gartner published its technology and trend predictions for the next few years and among the dominant trends were a greater move towards cloud computing and increasing consumerisation of IT.
MicroScope asked a number of people in the IT industry for their views on the technologies and trends that would dominate 2012 and the opportunities they might present for the channel....
David McLeman, managing director at Ancoris, believes there will be a time of reckoning for vendors that have muddied the water by rebranding hosting services and traditional datacentres as 'private clouds'.
In 2012, he claims, it will become much clearer what companies are really buying when they choose a 'private cloud' and that the services don't offer the economies of scale, resilience, flexibility and mobility benefits of true multi-tenanted 'public cloud' services. Channel organisations guilty of 'cloud-washing' existing services "will struggle as better informed users begin to see through the hype and migrate to true cloud offerings".
But the opening of the government's G-Cloud applications catalogue in 2012 will increase confidence in the security and privacy of information accessed via the cloud. It will "allay the concerns over security which represent the final barrier to widespread adoption of cloud services".
