In 2015, the big cloud companies will make the cloud a battle of commodity economics that will force out the second-tier clouds, the commoditization of cloud services will provide the foundation for the vendors of next-generation, cloud-based technologies; and the split between legacy IT and the cloud will force spin-offs. This is all according to Lazarus Vekiarides, CTO and co-founder of ClearSky Data, an early-stage company (currently in stealth mode) building a breakthrough solution in enterprise infrastructure.

Vekiarides’s predictions about enterprise cloud are all part of our second annual Technology Predictions series in which industry experts share their predictions with us about the hot tech trends that they think will take center stage in 2015. We’ll be sharing all of their predictions with you over the next couple of days. Read on for more from Vekiarides.

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2014 made it clear that public clouds are here to stay. We saw a seismic shift toward Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings and 2015 will bring more of the same. Welcome to the new world of “Everything-as-a-Service.” What’s going to happen next depends on the priorities of every enterprise and where and how they want to manage their work loads. The companies that are creating solutions for these cloud-specific systems will find that the best way to win out in the enterprise is by finding ways to enhance teams and processes to drive innovation

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Prediction No. 1: The big guys will make the cloud a battle of commodity economics that will force out the second-tier clouds

The biggest cloud players in the market— Amazon.com, Inc.’s Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud platform—will continue to fight each other with price cuts and feature enhancements, which will leave the handful of cloud challengers with little on which to differentiate. These smaller cloud vendors won’t have the scale to compete on price nor the cash flow to fund the battle of attrition. Expect to see some clouds (especially those borne of legacy IT vendors) to quietly vanish into the ether as a result.

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Prediction No. 2: Commoditization of cloud services will provide the foundation for the vendors of next-generation, cloud-based technologies

The struggle among Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud will cause the cloud market to become increasingly commoditized. In 2015, new cloud-oriented technology companies will capitalize on the commodity cloud to better address the needs of the enterprise. They will take advantage of the infighting among the bigger players and focus on the more demanding needs of the higher-end customer. This innovation will take the form of applications, orchestration, security and high-value services such as disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity.

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Prediction No. 3: The split between legacy IT and the cloud will force spin-offs

Traditional IT vendors are trying to adapt to their more agile, cloud-focused competitors and are having a hard time shedding their past legacy IT skin. These companies find themselves with outdated, bureaucratic structures and, as a result, will have no choice in 2015 but to spin off parts of their offerings in an attempt to make them more nimble, robust and profitable for shareholders.

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Prediction No. 4: The Hybrid Internet will support more hybrid cloud deployments

In 2015, the rise of dark fiber and metro Ethernet will help bridge the gap between public and private infrastructure, allowing companies to more readily adopt on- and off-premises work loads.

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Prediction No. 5: Managed service providers (MSPs) and co-location providers will flourish with hybrid IT offerings

The popularity of hybrid IT will feed the success of MSPs and co-location providers who will work with companies to provide hybrid IT offerings that leverage public cloud cost and accessibility with the benefits of on-premises control and oversight. Cloud will continue to make an enormous impact on enterprise infrastructure in 2015. The increases in accessibility and affordability will drive advances in innovation as technology providers learn to use the cloud for a new generation of services.

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2015 Technology Predictions graphic courtesy of SiliconANGLE