As promised in our earlier post, here are the final predictions we saw making the rounds in the blogosphere at the start of the year.
Many are predicting that Microsoft will get more serious about the cloud. Amazon dominated the cloud news in 2013, but 2014 will be a good year for Microsoft and Google, said Dan Sullivan on Search Cloud Computing. «Microsoft is paving the way for hybrid clouds with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. By the end of 2014, we should have a better understanding of good practices for managing workloads across hybrid Azure clouds.
Bernard Golden on CIO echoes the sentiment. «In a way, AWS has had a free ride to this point. Most of its competition has come from the hosting world, and, as noted, is unable to take a software approach to the domain. The inevitable result: AWS has improved, and grown, much more rapidly than other CSPs. That unopposed free run will end in 2014. Both Google and Microsoft have AWS in their crosshairs and are rolling out serious competitive offerings, designed for an all-out battle royale.»