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 ninth 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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Now we move on to cloud predictions for 2014. Here, we hear predictions from Jay Kidd, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at NetApp. In a NetApp 360 blog post entitled, The IT Almanac for 2014, Kidd discusses 10 technology predictions for 2014. With permission, we share them with you here.

Jay Kidd of NetApp

In his blog, Kidd points out that there are two main themes in his predictions—one around the hybrid cloud and the other around the global acceleration of emerging technologies—that allow today’s CIOs to provide more responsive and more significant IT services.

Prediction No. 1: Hybrid clouds will become the dominant vision for enterprise IT.

The tension within IT on moving to the cloud will resolve as organizations recognize that a hybrid cloud model is needed to serve their application portfolio. CIOs will sort their application portfolio into those applications that they must control entirely (in on-premises private clouds), control partially (in enterprise public clouds), as well as workloads that are more transient (public hyper scalar clouds) and those best purchased as SaaS. IT will act as brokers across these diverse cloud models. This will also uncover the need to easily move application data between clouds and to provision consistent storage service capabilities across different cloud models.

Prediction No. 2: Hunger Games will begin for all-flash startups.

The flash market will see increased growth as the presence of mainstream enterprise storage companies validates this technology trend. The battle between mainstream players and bleeding-edge, all-flash offerings will be won by those that best enable customers to deploy the right level of performance, reliability and scalability for their specific needs and workloads. Growth in international markets will be led by mainstream legacy players who have the ability to deliver and support products globally.

Prediction No. 3: If you work in IT, you will be a service provider.

As CIOs move to managing a portfolio of cloud services, they will look at their internal IT as one more service option. All IT owned by a company will be considered a “private cloud” and expectations of responsiveness to the business, cost competitiveness and service-level agreements will be compared to external cloud options.

Prediction No. 4: “Reality versus hype” will become clear around software-defined storage.

As the software-defined data center vision gains acceptance, the evolutionary path of the infrastructure components will become clearer. Policy-based software control over traditional infrastructure components will begin to take root. Virtual versions of infrastructure components—network and storage controllers—will become more common. The most valuable virtual components are those that cleanly integrate with existing physical network and storage systems, and that can offer features and services consistent with those offered by traditional physical controllers.

Prediction No. 5: Storage virtual machines will enable data mobility and application agility.

Just as virtual machines enabled the movement of running applications between physical servers, storage virtual machines will liberate data from specific physical storage. These logical containers of data volumes simplify migration of workloads between storage clusters and enable highly available storage clusters in metro areas.

Prediction No 6: OpenStack will survive the hype and move beyond early adopters.

OpenStack will continue to gain momentum in 2014, becoming the “open” alternative to commercial products for data center orchestration. As OpenStack distributions become more “product” than “project,” more enterprises and service providers will move to adopt them. OpenStack will become the most successful enterprise open-source technology since Linux.

Prediction No. 7: Questions on data sovereignty will impact private and public storage.

The widespread adoptions of cloud computing and storage services have challenged traditional geopolitical barriers. This leads to concerns by large enterprises in many countries regarding government disclosure laws that their data is subject to. Organizations outside the United States will seek hybrid cloud options that allow them to maintain sovereign control of their data while still taking advantage of cloud computing economics.

Prediction No. 8: 40GbE adoption will take off in the data center.

The next evolution of the Ethernet, 40GB, will begin widespread adoption at the core of the data center. Higher bandwidths allow larger datasets to move more quickly and easily which, in turn, encourages the growth of data.

Prediction No. 9: Big Data will evolve from analyzing data you have to driving the collection of new data.

As companies derive value from analytics on existing data, they will move to collect additional data that will further their insight. New devices will emerge to gather more data about consumer behaviors, industrial processes, and natural phenomenon. These data sources will be used by existing analytics to improve insight, and they will give rise to entirely new analytic applications.

Prediction No. 10: Clustered storage, converged infrastructure, object storage, and in-memory databases will all continue their momentum in 2014.

Several technology trends that built momentum in 2013 will continue to grow. Clustered storage adoption will accelerate. Converged infrastructure will become the most compelling building block of data center infrastructure. The adoption of object storage will grow as applications that monetize vast capacities of data objects gather momentum. And in-memory databases, led by the popularity of SAP HANA, will enter the mainstream.

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 tenth and final installation, in which we heard Cloud predictions from F5.