It’s gratifying to see that the trends are becoming abundantly clear not only to us, but the analyst community as well. Last week we talked about four predictions for 2013. It turns out that analysts from Forbes, Forrester, Gartner and GigaOm were saying the same thing.

1. Everything stored on your devices will move into the cloud

The personal cloud replaces the notion of personal computer. The cloud will house all aspects of one’s life, Gartner says.

We agree, and we think the number of files that will move to the cloud over the next few years, at least 5 trillion, is astounding. Consumer clouds have made it extremely simple to deal with personal content like photos. Businesses however, have been put in a tight spot. To date, they have had to say no to their users, or turn a blind eye. No longer.

2. The death of the desktop forces all the infrastructure around it to change

James Staten of Forrester says, “More often than not, we are finding mobile applications connected to cloud-based back-end services (increasingly to commercial mobile-back-ends-as-a-service) that can elastically respond to mobile client engagements and shield your data center from this traffic.”

We call this architecture a Cloud App, and we think its just the beginning of how the applications and infrastructure needs to evolve as the “desktop” of today (a personal computer with a pointer-driven GUI and local file system) fades into the sunset.

3. A new technology vendor landscape will emerge

Barb Darrow and Stacey Higginbothamm from GigaOm say, “For the past few years, all the legacy hardware powers — Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM– scrambled to prove their relevance in a new world where cloud computing makes hardware branding irrelevant. But HP is in the hottest seat this coming year…”

The personal computer and server industries have been challenged in the past few years by tablets and cloud compute. We believe this trend will continue into storage and data management. Indeed, the cloud storage price war between AWS, Google and Azure is just the beginning.

4. Enterprise Cloud will rise, and along with it, a new type of IT organization

Joe McKendrick of Forbes is seeing what we’re seeing, which is a rebirth of IT, “While some have feared cloud may make IT departments no longer relevant, the opposite effect is occurring. The ability to move forward with information technology is now seen as a vital strategic and competitive advantage, and those organizations that can do it in the nimblest and smartest fashion will come out ahead. IT executives will increasingly be stepping forward to lead the way, provisioning resources both from within and outside the enterprise walls.”

We definitely don’t think this is half-baked, Joe.

IT is more relevant than ever as technology makes the next major leap towards becoming a transparent utility. Enterprises need more guidance than ever as to which technologies will give them competitive advantage in the market, increase productivity, reduce risk, reduce turnover and improve employee satisfaction.

The combination of new “PCs” and a new infrastructure to support them make innovation possible, both from vendor and practitioner perspectives. We’re looking forward to meeting you next year and seeing if we can help you take maximum advantage of the Cloud era.

Onward!

-Leo
@lleung