Skytap Reveals its Top 2017 Cloud & Software Development Predictions

SEATTLE, Dec. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Skytap, Inc., an innovative public cloud for application modernization, today announced its top cloud industry predictions for 2017. Enterprise IT departments are recognizing the time is now to begin addressing their legacy applications/infrastructure and adapting their current cloud strategy in order to stay modern and meet increasing employee and customer demands. In response, Skytap forsees this coming year to bring innovation across all facets of the cloud industry to address the continually evolving needs of enterprises, including an increase in container integrations, multi-cloud market saturation, a collective move to on-premises clouds, and bringing legacy applications into a hybrid state.

"With the enterprise seal of approval for the cloud firmly in place, in 2017 we will see companies mature to seeking out more complex solutions that provide them with seamless migration, on-demand scalability, increase production speeds, and deliver cost savings metrics," said Dan Jones, director of product management, Skytap. "Skytap is primed to meet enterprises' greatest needs with our purpose-driven public cloud that provides unrivalled support for application modernization."

Skytap predicts the following industry shifts to occur in 2017:

1. Container adoption will move from early adopters to early majority. This shift will be marked by an increase in software vendors adding container capabilities to their existing products and introducing new products. We will also see new solutions that improve manageability of containers at scale. For example, this year we saw Docker get serious about enabling customers to run containers in production. The launch of Docker Datacenter, with manageability and security features moved the needle a long way. For many though, Kubernetes is the choice for container orchestration. One start-up aiming to simplify the adoption of Kubernetes is Heptio, founded by the guys from Google who kick started the project, came out of stealth mode late this year. The container snowball of innovation is overwhelming many of the tools that have traditionally been associated with DevOps. Generally, we are past the unreasonable hype phase of DevOps and now starting to look at real results. What we see is that DevOps is difficult even wrenching to put into place, but the benefits are so compelling there really is no choice for most organizations. How can they not do something that makes them faster and more stable at the same time?
2. Multi-cloud saturates the market in 2017 driven by skyrocketing enterprise adoption of purpose-driven clouds. Adoption rates of multi-cloud are high in the enterprise with Forrester reporting some 65 percent of companies already onboard, but anticipate that uptick to gain an even steeper trajectory in 2017 as more enterprises than ever are discovering the critical value proposition leveraging a mix of clouds built for a specific purpose. Purpose-driven clouds generally have less over-provisioning, and often out-perform generic multi-purpose "one-size-fits-all" solutions. By using the right platform for the right workload, enterprises have been able to cut costs, increase overall performance and efficiency, and consistently deliver features that support business needs. Building a portfolio of purpose-driven clouds that work together is the next evolution in a more intelligent multi-cloud approach.
3. 2017 will see more enterprises attempting to build a private cloud. This will include migrating workloads from existing public clouds to private clouds on-premises. Public cloud providers will respond with a greater emphasis on migration, usage visibility, and cost control features. The RightScale 2016 State of Cloud survey reported that companies with greater than 1,000 VMs in a private cloud grew from 22 percent in 2015 to 31 percent in 2016. The public cloud offers many great benefits; however, it requires thoughtful consideration of the workload to be run as well as dependent applications. The reality is enterprises have a significant footprint of applications, which for many reasons cannot run in the public cloud or can be run cheaper on a private cloud. Late this year SUSE acquired the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets from HPE. One of the reasons SUSE cited for the acquisition is to strengthen its position of offering enterprise-ready private cloud technology. In October, Amazon launched the Server Migration Service, and at AWS re:Invent they announced Snowmobile. These solutions make it easier for enterprises to migrate on-premises VMs and data to AWS. This is likely the start of enterprise-friendly features we'll see from public cloud providers.
4. Achilles heel of enterprise IT departments, legacy apps, will meet its match in 2017-- Hybrid Applications. Traditionally, legacy enterprise applications have proven difficult to modernize because it's nearly impossible to move them entirely to a public cloud. Application modernization has been a longstanding IT headache, because legacy multi-tier enterprise applications typically have a complex web of dependencies on underlying operating systems, hardware configurations, and network topologies. This often results in "Bimodal IT," where businesses face the overwhelming challenge of striking a balance between their slow legacy apps and much quicker modern ones. Gartner recently forecast that through 2019, every $1 that enterprises invest in innovation will require an additional $7 in core execution predicting that the majority of the $150 billion in enterprise application software spending is going towards modernizing, functionally expanding or substituting long-standing business and office applications with cloud-based software-as-a-service. As enterprise IT architects and developers execute their strategy for modernizing legacy applications, expect them to pour most of these dollars into creating hybrid applications that have proven highly effective in opportunistically taking advantage of cloud-based services. In 2017, we'll see legacy apps modernized, but still barely scratch the surface of the conversion that needs to take place to bring all organizations up to speed.

About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap is a public cloud provider that enables enterprises to modernize traditional applications and achieve their DevOps goals. Skytap uniquely supports application modernization with environments that work the same way as an on-premises data center. Skytap packages servers, VMs, networks, data and configurations into environments that can be provisioned, cloned, suspended and shared around the world with a single click. To try Skytap and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

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PR Contact
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SOURCE Skytap, Inc.

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