Making predictions is almost as traditional at New Year’s as countdowns to midnight. So here are some of mine:

We live in interesting times: The multiple forces buffeting the IT industry — cloud, mobile, flash storage, virtualization and software-led everything, converged systems, big data — will only strengthen through the year. IT will spend the year scrambling to keep up, and we will begin to see early leaders emerge based on aggressive implementations of some of these revolutionary technologies. By year end, however, no midsized-to-large organization will have the compete package fully in place, and the major reorganizations that software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and mobile in particular will eventually drive will still be in the future. CIOs should focus on implementing technologies such as comprehensive mobile management and predictive analytics based on big data where they can have the greatest immediate impact on the business while experimenting with infrastructure that implements and integrates the full set in the lab. One major focus in the laboratory should be optimizing the organization for the new IT of the 21st Century.

IBM, HP, and AWS will fight for cloud platform leadership: The cloud — both public and private, hybrid and managed — will be a major new competitive battleground in 2014 and beyond. For this first round, the OpenStack confederation, led by HP and IBM, will square off against early leader Amazon AWS. HP made its commitment clear at Discover 2013 Europe this month, with details of its reorganized cloud group, that unified its public and private development and sales teams, and promises of a major investment in OpenStack and cloud development. This will make it a leader in OpenStack. However, IBM is also totally committed to OpenStack and has moved or built core technologies including WebSphere on it. So my prediction here is that IBM and HP will become co-leaders, with Rackspace and other members of the OpenStack group contributing as well. This combined effort will pitch OpenStack development forward at an accelerated pace, with the various vendors building their individual proprietary products on top. Meanwhile, AWS seems to be moving toward entering the private/hybrid cloud market with its own converged solution for data centers. And while HP and IBM are still much larger companies, they have many other technologies that need their investment. Amazon is totally focused on the cloud. CIOs can place their bets with a fair assurance that whichever they pick will be around for the long term. My prediction: CloudStack will win eventually, but for 2014 AWS will remain in the lead.

Flash storage will become mainstream for all data: The price of flash will continue to fall rapidly in 2014, making it cost-competitive with spinning rust on a gbyte-to-gbyte basis by year end. The volume of spinning disk array sales will drop rapidly through the year, so that by year-end buyers will need a specific reason to buy disk rather than flash, and those reasons will be scarce on the ground. Ironically this will have little impact on the tape market, although that may change in the future if  removable flash storage cartridges at a price that competes with tape appear on the market.

HP Memrister will struggle to find a market: This is a corollary to the flash prediction above, and I would not have mentioned it except that HP CEO Meg Whitman specifically promised next-generation systems using Memrister solid-state storage in her keynote at HP Discover in Barcelona. HP has talked about Memrister as a faster, better SSD than NAND flash for at least three years, during which time the cost of flash has plummeted and supplies from multiple sources have grown significantly. The problem is that it would have to be at least a full generation better in speed, dependability, and energy use to justify the inevitably higher cost for even very high end use cases. Without the volume generated by the consumer electronics market to drive it, it will never come close to the price of flash. At best it will be a niche product.

IBM MobileFirst will challenge VDI for mobile management market:  2014 is a make-or-break year for VDI. All through 2013 I have heard about growing interest in the technology from several sources including IaaS service providers as well as hardware and software vendors. Companies are looking at VDI as a way to deliver suites of business services to employees on their mobile devices as well as desktops. However the problem with VDI is that it is a one-size-fits-all approach to delivering those services to diverse populations of devices in BYOD environments. A better solution, that brings much less compute overhead, is a comprehensive mobile device management suite. The prime example is IBM’s MobileFirst suite. This allows users or vendors to develop one set of apps and deliver them to run natively on a wide range of iOS, Android, Window 8 , and other mobile devices. It provides comprehensive security and management for all the mobile devices in a company. My prediction is that 2014 will see ITOs refocus on the management of the diverse populations of devices n their BYOD environments and that MobileFirst will win a large portion of that market with VDI coming in in second place.

In mobile, Microsoft will gain marketshare, HP will remain a niche player: I expect Windows 8 tablets and smartphones to gain marketshare steadily through 2014. The new Surface is by all reports an excellent tablet, priced at the high end of the market, but that price will come down at the end of the year. I would expect Windows 8 to grow over the year to capture 20 percent of total mobile device sales by year’s end. Of course things could change rapidly if, for instance, Microsoft were to woo Samsung away from Android. Unfortunately unless it changes its strategy, HP will not benefit from this gradual increase in Win 8 market presence. It seems determined to sell its Win 8 tablets to IT purchasing departments and seems to have little interest in the consumer market, which with BYOD is where the action is in mobile. This condemns it to a niche market.