John McAdam – President & CEO of F5 Networks

The cloud is poised for rapid growth in the enterprise, with more and more CIOs embracing hybrid models to keep pace with the growing number of devices and applications in the Internet of Things. John McAdam, the president and CEO of F5 Networks, expects this trend to swing into high gear in 2014 across both North America and Europe, where companies are finally warming up to the cloud thanks to the efforts of providers such as Temenos T24.

As more enterprise apps get moved off-premise, the software-as-a-service category of solutions will split up into clearly definable sub-segments like security, disaster recovery and management automation. Along the way, traditional IT organizations will transform into service brokers tasked with providing a consistent set of capabilities to geographically distributed users while maintaining security and compliance across all locations.

NetApp SVP and CTO Jay Kidd has a similar view: he predicts that in-house infrastructure will be increasingly weighed against the advantage of the public cloud as companies pursue higher returns on their technology investments. OpenStack will prove instrumental in helping CIOs justify their on-premise deployments.

“At the moment, AWS is dominating in the public cloud space, but in 2014 we expect to start seeing a vast number of public cloud deployments around the world based on OpenStack,” says Nick Barcet, the vice president of products at OpenStack specialist eNovance. “Eventually, OpenStack will attract more users than other public offers in multi-cloud environments, and we believe that the first step for this to happen is for public clouds to become more open and available starting in 2014,” he predicts.

On the software-defined data center front, both McAdam and Kidd anticipate accelerated adoption in 2014. The NetApp CTO also sees clustered storage, converged infrastructure and in-memory processing gaining momentum this year as new use cases emerge.