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At the end of every year, industry analysts and reporters are releasing their predictions for the coming 12 months. Jonny Bentwood, Director, Analyst Relations and Strategy at Edelman running the Technobabble 2.0 blog summarized some of these predictions, giving an overview of the different predictions made by the following firms: Gartner, Ovum, CCS Insight, Nucleus Research, HfS,  Infotrends, Quocirca, IHS Screen Digest, Forrester, Disruptive Analysis, Tech Market View.

Some of the predictions related to virtualization and cloud computing include:

Gartner:

• By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 per cent of labor hours associated with IT services.
• By 2015, 20 per cent of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers.
• By 2014, 90 per cent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.
• By 2013, 80 per cent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.

Ovum:

• Mobility – In IT management, the mobility challenge in 2011 will be to embrace the new technology while developing a strategy that maintains a balance between user preference and productivity and corporate security and compliance.

• Data centre transformation – The role of the data centre is witnessing a dramatic shift as the cloud computing era heralds a new dawn in the delivery of IT services in 2011.
• Cloud services – Cloud computing will continue to grow steadily in 2011.

CCS Insight:

• Operators will focus on speed and quality of service rather than number of gigabytes when marketing mobile data.
• Operators will pay subsidies based on the data efficiency of a software platform, favouring BlackBerry over iOS and Android.

Nucleus Research:

• Politicians are out of touch with the realities of IT. The cloud enables white-collar workers to work anywhere, allowing smart companies to seek locales with low taxes and overhead.
• The cloud changes everything – still. Companies large and small are taking advantage of the economic and environmental advantages of developing and computing in the cloud.

HfS:

• Integrated offerings from service providers with broad capability gain market share. Distinction between BPO and ITO blurs
• Many CIOs will thrive or fail because of Cloud demand from their business function leaders

Infotrends – Zac Butcher:

• Cloud printing (or a similar term) to become the next big thing in the printing industry – we’re going to start moving beyond MPS and the hubbub around MPS – companies will begin to realise that the underlying theme is the mobility of the knowledge worker and that business processes, of which the majority still involve paper somewhere along the line, will need to adapt, evolve and maybe be totally reinvented for the next computing age

Quocirca – Clive Longbottom:

• The cloud will burst – initial attempts by many companies to adopt cloud will show some of the issues – latency, service levels, lack of predictability will all make organisations wonder if cloud is all it has been built up to be.

Forrester – James Staten:

• You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. And this is a good thing.

• Hosted private clouds will outnumber internal clouds 3:1. The top reason empowered employees go to public cloud services is speed. They can gain access to these services in minutes. Private clouds must meet this demand and not once, but consistently.
• Community clouds will arrive, thank to compliance.
• Cloud economics gets switched on. Being cheap is good.

• Cloud standards still won’t be here — get over it.

• Cloud security will be proven but not by the providers alone. Because cloud security isn’t their responsibility —it’s shared.

Tech Market View – Richard Holway:

• Asked the classic question, I’d go long on Microsoft and short on Google. I think Microsoft now has a really good set of Cloud offerings and, in the enterprise in particular, would be the preferred partner. Conversely I still think that Google has a scattergun approach to everything outside of its core sponsored search market.