Between quantum computing, blockchain, and hybrid cloud IBM is pursuing a pretty ambitious agenda. Of the three, hybrid promises the most immediate payback. Cloud computing is poised to become a “turbocharged engine powering digital transformation around the world,” states a new Forrester report, Predictions 2019: Cloud Computing
Of course, IBM didn’t wait until 2019. It purchased Red Hat Linux at the end of Oct. 2018. DancingDinosaur covered it here a few days later. At that time IBM Chairman Ginni Rometty called the acquisition of Red Hat a game-changer. “It changes everything about the cloud market,” she noted. At a cost of $34 billion, 10x Red Hat’s gross revenue, it had better be a game changer.
Forrester continues, predicting that in 2019 the cloud will reach its more interesting young adult years, bringing innovative development services to enterprise apps rather than just serving up cheaper, temporary servers and storage, which is how it has primarily grown over the past decade. Who hasn’t turned to one or another cloud provider to augment its IT resources as needed, whether backup or server capacity, and network?
As Forrester puts it: The six largest hyperscale cloud leaders — Alibaba, Amazon Web Services [AWS], Google, IBM, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle — will all grow larger in 2019, as service catalogs and global regions expand. Meanwhile, the global cloud computing market, including cloud platforms, business services, and SaaS, will exceed $200 billion in 2019, expanding at more than 20%, the research firm predicts.
Hybrid clouds, which provide two or more cloud providers or platforms, are emerging as the preferred way for enterprises to go. Notes IBM: The digital economy is forcing organizations to a multi-cloud environment. Three of every four enterprises have already implemented more than one cloud. The growth of cloud portfolios in enterprises demands an agnostic cloud management platform — one that not only provides automation, provisioning and orchestration, but that also monitors trends and usage to prevent outages.
Of course, IBM also offers a solution for this; the company’s Multicloud Manager runs on its IBM Cloud Private platform, which is based on Kubernetes container orchestration technology, described as an open-source approach for ‘wrapping’ apps in containers, and thereby making them easier and cheaper to manage across different cloud environments – from on-premises systems to the public cloud.
Along with hybrid clouds containers are huge in Forrester’s view. Powered by cloud-native open source components and tools, companies will start rolling out their own digital application platforms that will span clouds, include serverless and event-driven services, and form the foundation for modernizing core business apps for the next decade, the researchers observed. Next year’s hottest trend, according to Forrester, will be making containers easier to deploy, secure, monitor, scale, and upgrade. “Enterprise-ready container platforms from Docker, IBM, Mesosphere, Pivotal, Rancher, Red Hat, VMware, and others are poised to grow rapidly,” the researchers noted.
This may not be as straightforward as the researchers imply. Each organization must select for itself which private cloud strategy is most appropriate, they note. They anticipate greater private cloud structure emerging in 2019. It noted that organizations face three basic private cloud paths: building internally, using vSphere sprinkled with developer-focused tools and software-defined infrastructure; and having its cloud environment custom-built with converged or hyperconverged software stacks to minimize the tech burden. Or lastly, building its cloud infrastructure internally with OpenStack, relying on the hard work of its own tech-savvy team. Am sure there are any number of consultants, contractors, and vendors eager to step in and do this for you.
If you aren’t sure, IBM is offering a number of free trials that you can play with.
As Forrester puts it: Buckle up; for 2019 expect the cloud ride to accelerate.
DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.
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