SiliconANGLE recently featured a multi-part “Technology Predictions for 2014” series in which industry providers shared their predictions about the hot tech trends that will take center stage in 2014. We heard Big Data, cloud and mobile predictions from various companies including Alpine Data Labs, MapR Technologies, Netapp, RadiumOne, SAP, SGI, Think Big Analytics and Xplenty.

Today we decided to extend the series, this time with a set of cloud predictions from Nick Barcet, VP of Products at eNovance. (Note that Barcet also sits on the Board of Directors at the OpenStack Foundation.)

Public clouds based on OpenStack

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According to Barcet, we will start seeing a significant number of public clouds open up that will be based on OpenStack in 2014. He said this will be the first step of OpenStack winning the long-term battle of getting more users for OpenStack than other players in multi-cloud deployments. “At the moment, when it comes to the public cloud space, AWS is dominating,” Barcet told siliconANGLE. “However, in 2014, we expect to start seeing a vast number of public cloud deployments around the world based on OpenStack. We foresee the number of public clouds based on OpenStack significantly growing, and [we will] start seeing OpenStack take share within cloud deployments globally and by many different local actors.”

Barcet added that data localization has already become one of the key elements in this next battle. “And, eventually, OpenStack will attract more users than other public offers in multi-cloud environments. We believe that the first step for this to happen is for public clouds to become more open and available starting in 2014.”

Barcet also predicts that 2014 will be the year in which consolidation will start to happen between OpenStack companies. It will be a year in which users will realize that it is more important to keep their freedom about how to deploy their application than it is to rely on any set of single vendor technology, he said.

This year, single-vendor cloud technology will start to be outpaced by open-source ones in terms of feature growth, according to Barcet.

Cloud will drive IPv6 adoption

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Barcet also predicts that 2014 will be the year in which IPv6-only cloud infrastructure deployments will start to happen. He says the new reality is that clouds, not enterprises, are driving the adoption of IPv6. “The lack of IPv4 addresses aren’t as big a problem for normal users of the Internet as some predicted,” Barcet said. “However, public clouds need to have a lot of IPv4 addresses. The number of hosts a public cloud needs in order to operate is limited by the number of IPv4 addresses. So we’ll see public clouds operating only IPv6.”

The private cloud in 2014

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This year will be the one in which private cloud deployment using OpenStack will, according to Barcet, start to be “productized beyond the engine, and thus allow it to turn into a mature technology.” He says there will be an evolution in defining what a cloud is. “Right now, a cloud is a technology which allows a customer to launch ecosystems at will. They don’t care whether this is done using standards or proprietary technology,” Barcet said. “This is going to change in 2014 because people will start to realize the cloud is a way to have the capacity to switch providers quickly. To do that they need to rely on something that isn’t vendor-dependent.”

He added that the single-vendor solution will not be seen as a good solution in the short term. “Azure, AWS are great, but are not convertible long-term solutions for the enterprise,” Barcet said. “In 2014, customers will realize how important it is for them to keep their independence.”

Barcet also predicts that 2014 will also be the year in which continuous integration and delivery will become the norm instead of the exception. “[2014 will be the year] where eNovance will become a global player as a cloud infrastructure integrator,” Barcet added.