As 2013 winds down, it’s only natural for people to make personal New Year’s resolutions for 2014. It’s also a perfect time for technology industry predictions.

This is the tenth and final installation in our multi-part “Technology Predictions for 2014” series in which industry providers—from Big Data to cloud to mobile—share their predictions about the hot tech trends that will take center stage in 2014.

So far in this series

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In this series we’ve heard Big Data predictions in the first installation from Saggi Neumann, co-founder and CTO of Xplenty, a cloud-based, code-free, “Hadoop as a Service” platform. In the second installation, we heard Big Data predictions from Quentin Gallivan, CEO of Pentaho, a provider of open-source reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities.

In the third installation, we heard Big Data predictions from Steven Hillion, Chief Product Officer of Alpine Data Labs, a code-free, in-cluster web analytics platform that analyzes Big Data and Hadoop. In the fourth installation, we heard Big Data predictions from John Schroeder, co-founder and CEO of MapR Technologies, a software provider of Hadoop technology for Big Data deployments.

In the fifth installation, we heard Big Data predictions from Ron Bodkin, founder and CEO of Think Big Analytics. The sixth installation brought Big Data predictions from SGI President and CEO Jorge Titinger.

Next came the mobile predictions of our “Technology Predictions for 2014” series. In the seventh installment, Bill Clark, Global Vice President, Mobile Services at enterprise application software provider SAP, offered up four mobile predictions. Then, in the eighth installation, Gurbaksh Chahal, founder and CEO of advertising software company RadiumOne, shared his mobile predictions for 2014.

The cloud in 2014

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Then we moved on to cloud predictions for 2014. In the ninth installation, we heard 10 cloud predictions from Jay Kidd, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at NetApp.

John McAdam of F5

Now, in this tenth and final installation, we will hear six cloud predictions from John McAdam, President and CEO of F5 Networks, a company that provides performance, security and cloud solutions for other top global websites, enterprises and service providers. The following are McAdam’s cloud predictions for 2014.

Prediction No. 1: The Internet of Things will drive the trend toward hybrid cloud deployments.

As billions of everyday objects are connected to the Internet, organizations will find themselves needing to support far more devices and applications than ever before. Organizations that do not have the on-premises resources to scale to meet this demand will need to turn to hybrid cloud deployments.

Prediction No. 2: The need for cloud broker services will grow.

IT departments will need to deploy applications and application services (such as identity and access management) in a unified way across multiple locations—both on and off premises, across traditional data centers and in the cloud. The need for security and access control will remain unchanged, but better tools will be required in order for IT to manage these services intelligently and consistently.

Prediction No. 3: More enterprise-class applications will migrate to the cloud.

IT organizations will continue migrating enterprise-class applications to the cloud. This will drive demand for appropriate integration and management tools that seamlessly connect public and private environments, as well as deliver the user experience and performance required.

Prediction No. 4: Cloud adoption in Europe will take hold. 

Europe, in general, has been slow to adopt cloud computing due to concerns about security and regulatory compliance. However, with the growing popularity of cloud-based financial services such as Temenos T24 (showing how it can be done safely), look for cloud adoption across Europe to grow in 2014.

Prediction No. 5: 2014 will see an explosion of XaaS market definitions.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is already too broad and must now support subcategories with more precise definitions. For example, Disaster Recovery (DRaaS), Security (SECaaS) and Management (MaaS) are already being defined. We can expect to see further granularity of definitions appearing over the next 12 months.

Prediction No. 6: Software-defined networking (SDN) will break into the mainstream. 

Volumes have been written about SDN in 2013. But in 2014, SDN will finally start to become more commonplace, with pilot projects maturing into production environments and interest in the technology increasing from a diverse customer base. 2014 could be the year of Software-Defined Anything (application services, data centers, storage, etc.).

Click here for the first installation our “Technology Predictions for 2014” series, in which we heard Big Data predictions from Xplenty.

Click here for the second installation, in which we heard Big Data predictions from Pentaho.

Click here for the third installation, in which we heard Big Data predictions from Alpine Data Labs.

Click here for the fourth installation, which we heard Big Data predictions from MapR Technologies.

Click here for the fifth installation, in which we heard Big Data predictions from Think Big Analytics.

Click here for the sixth installation, in which we heard Big Data predictions from SGI.

Click here for the seventh installation, in which we heard Mobile predictions from SAP.

Click here for the eighth installation, in which we heard Mobile predictions from RadiumOne.

Click here for the ninth installation, in which we heard Cloud predictions from NetApp.