Private Cloud Deployments Increase, but Public Cloud Providers Prove to be More Secure.

From Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO of Bromium: There will be significant growth in enterprise private clouds as CIOs are keen to adopt consumption-based IT services to shed their capital-expense-intensive private cloud arena. However, public cloud providers will continue to strengthen their offerings, ultimately proving they are more secure than any enterprise-implemented cloud.

From John Kreisa, director of marketing with Red Hats Storage Business Unit: In both cloud and big data environments, software will prove essential in 2012. Companies will become increasingly aware that hardware adds costs and decreases functionality. Organizations will steer clear of bulky, proprietary storage appliances and move to a software-only solution for storage management.

From Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog: In the coming year as the OpenStack community grows and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) matures, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies will begin offering IaaS options to their customers as single infrastructure and language PaaS becomes too limiting. It will also become increasingly important to be IaaS-agnostic, a viewpoint shared with chief executives, including VMware’s Paul Maritz.

From Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda: In 2012, as cloud utilization continues to skyrocket, we’ll see enterprises deploying private PaaS, which will bring new types of agility and economics to the IT department and corporations.

From Rajesh Ramchandani, founder and vice president of products at CumuLogic: 2012 will bring a new batch of cloud platforms. We’ll see models evolve in a number of areas similar to Salesforce.com, where enterprises develop, host and sell applications within the Salesforce network. The cloud will power these platforms and the applications and ecosystems will emerge that benefit all–the platform companies and application developers via revenue and the community members via the availability of solutions that solve business issues.

From Nand Mulchandani, CEO of ScaleXtreme: Public vs. private is no longer the question but rather it is both that CIOs will need to evaluate. However, IT administrators and system administrators will have to take advantage of open infrastructure frameworks such as OpenStack and Citrix CloudStack to design and optimize their systems for multiple IaaS vendors.

From Steve Crawford, vice president of business development and marketing, Jamcracker: For many organizations, cloud adoption in 2011 was driven by individual business units, resulting in cloud sprawl that raises issues for enterprise IT in terms of enforcing compliance and security policies, as well as providing consistent life-cycle management and support services. The coming year will bring an emergence of the Cloud Services Brokerage model, which will solve the sprawl issue by easing application management and creating a consistent framework, that is, an internal marketplace of cloud and non-cloud services for the enterprise.

From Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink: New technological advances–as well as the increasing confidence enterprises have to deploy both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V–will encourage more customers to adopt heterogeneous strategies for their virtual infrastructure. Industry analysts will strongly encourage enterprise clients to evaluate Hyper-V, Xen and KVM and educate that multivendor competition produces the best financial outcome.

From Shai Fultheim, CEO of ScaleMP: Software-based, distributed, big data platforms and vertically scaled systems are contradictory approaches looking to address the same big-data analysis problem. In 2012, the growth rate and pace of big data will only increase as organizations continue to search for better, more effective ways to improve products and services. The demand for more big-data solutions will multiply, and more vendors will enter the arena to help solve this dilemma.

From Lee Caswell, founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Pivot3: Top upcoming VDI verticals such as health care, education and state and local government require a virtual desktop infrastructure that is cost-effective at small scale, can be sized on demand and that can be managed with today’s IT staff. Simply repurposing data center servers, SANs and switches will not meet the budget and management constraints of the very verticals that are most attracted to VDI. For these markets, a new model of infrastructure is required, and we are already seeing movements in this direction with the VMware Rapid Desktop Program and Citrix’s VDI-in-a-Box.