We asked Gregor Petri (pictured), popular CloudExpo speaker and Top 50 blogger on cloud computing and cloud advisor at CA technologies in Europe, for his expectations for 2011 and beyond:

1.  During 2011 a realization with set in that BIG IT is now the IT used to service “consumers” with news, games, films, videos and other mass (paid for) entertainment, instead of the IT used to service enterprises. This means that not just user device innovation (smartphones, laptops, tablets, displays) will be consumer driven, but also datacenter and cloud innovation will become more consumer centric.

2.  During 2011 the Service Management discipline will start a second rejuvenated life as management approach of choice for anything that is delivered “as a service”. Both on the production and on the consumption side of these services and as a result a discipline like ITIL will become a core asset for cloud practitioners. In anticipation of that CA Technologies asked ITSM Guru Malcolm Fry to review the core ITIL books in the context of cloud computing (downloadable here).

3.  During 2011 security will evolve from a cloud barrier to a cloud enabler, as companies realize that managing good and granular security is a core business for most cloud providers (we wrote about this here).

4.  2010 clearly was the year of publishing in the traditional 4P innovation cycle of Problem, Ponder, Publish & Pilot. So 2011 will be the year of large scale piloting.  Large scale production will come after that (only the fewest of innovations actually make it there).

5.  As cloud computing starts to proliferate through all layers of IT, people will start to look for a shorter way to describe cloud computing. I would not be surprised if “computing” becomes the new term for what we now call cloud computing, just like “interactive systems” simply became “systems”, when more and more jobs went from batch to on-line processing.

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