Just a quick note to say… (& 2011 prediction ramblings).

To all my valued regular readers and visitors to TechHead, Happy New Year to you and your family!  I just really wanted to write a quick something up on the blog to say ‘Thanks’ to everyone that has visited the site over the past year.  I have really enjoyed the conversations I have had with many of you via the comments of the various posts, forums and emails, and hope that you have found TechHead enjoyable and of value to you.

2010 was something of a crazy year for me, but in a positive way, contributing a couple of chapters to Eric Siebert’s ‘Maximum vSphere’ book, attending some tech day’s from HP and Stephen Foskett’s Gestalt IT, the vChat webcasts and of course starting my new role as a vSpecialist working for EMC.  The latter has been a crazy ride indeed and something of a steep learning curve in places.  I feel very fortunate to be involved in the EMC vSpecialist initiative as it is something quite unique and it’s nice to be gaining the view from ‘the inside’ as it were.  It has been great to work alongside such vast pool of quality virtualization, server and storage talent both from the technical and sales areas.  Now that I have my feet under the table a little more, or at least as far as you can due to the IT product landscape always changing, I am hoping to have more time in my evenings and weekends to once again dedicate to the blog.  You may have noticed that over the past year the number of blog posts I have been producing has been in decline, well please be rest assured that this will change in 2011 as I have a whiteboard full of ideas for cool and (hopefully) exciting posts which will start finding their way up onto the blog shortly.  I’d also like to say a big thanks to my site sponsors (PHD Virtual, Quest, Trainsignal and Veeam) who really assist in covering the costs of hosting, allows me to pay for the postage on the competitions that I run and allows me to update my blogging software. Much appreciated!

One thing I have found a little difficult to adjust to in 2010 was how I am now bundled as being a ‘vendor’ or a ‘vendor blogger’, now I’m not saying that this is a negative thing since I am perfectly happy with my new ‘vendor’ employer of choice(EMC) and their product range though for some reason, and this may be completely in my head, I get the feeling that people think that by working for a vendor you instantly have drunk the cool-aid and have sold out as a blogger.  I think most people who have made the transition across from being an ‘independent’ blogger to working for a large IT vendor will agree that it can be something of a tightrope you have to walk when blogging though I believe that if you have a true love and passion towards IT technology (whilst keeping an open mind and a close eye on the big picture) you can still successfully continue to blog with a level of integrity.  Of course what you do end up with is an increased appreciation and understanding of your vendor employers product stack so naturally if there are cool or interesting products you do tend to end up writing about it.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t..  I’m just going to continue to blog about what interests me (and hopefully you too) and the kit I am able to get my hands on. 

There has been some great IT products released this past year in both the hardware and software space, it’s good to see such healthy competition between the various IT manufacturers which continues to drive innovation.

It’s at this stage I feel compelled to jump on the 2011 IT predictions bandwagon that seem to be popular this year by everyone with access to WordPress and a blogging account.  So here are some of the TechHead Prediction Monkey’s predictions (aka stating the obvious) for the coming year: (Small print: please note these are my monkey’s thoughts and opinions and not those of my employer).

• Lingo Bingo:  The concept of a ‘Hybrid Cloud’ will gain traction in both understanding and uptake by many larger medium sized and enterprise companies. In fact it will continue to grow in buzz-word popularity in the Cloud/Virtualization space being one of the more popular virtualization terms banded around in 2011.  These larger companies will continue to kick the tyres on public Cloud provider offerings and will take cautious steps towards partial adoption in 2011. 
• Private Cloud: Private cloud (ie: VMware vSphere, MS Hyper-V, Xen, etc) utilisation will by far remain the most popular type of Cloud offering in almost all industries.  Perhaps excluding the likes of media and entertainment and similar who have already found some good uses for public cloud offerings for performing tasks such as video transcoding, etc.
• Plenty of Fish in the Sea (perhaps not): The large IT vendor scramble to buy up smaller IT companies to help them A) have an ‘end-to-end’ stack offering and/or B) a ‘Cloud’ offering will ease up a little with fewer suitable or attractive companies for the picking.  There will be some acquisitions but not as many as we saw in 2010.
• Big Fish Eats Big Fish:  There will be a couple of highly publicized large IT company takeovers by another large IT player(s).  This is to assist the purchasing company obtain both A and/or B categories mentioned above, ie: Big fish who plays in one pond will gobble up another significantly sized fish in another pond.  Thereby having access to a couple of ponds – or knocking through to create one big pond.  By consuming a larger company with a broader product set another large company can reach the end-to-end stack and/or Cloud mecca that many of them are aiming for much quicker and without many smaller acquisitions.
• Episode VI – Return of the Bloggers: Many of the popular virtualization bloggers who have fallen off the face of the earth since joining some of the larger IT tech companies will once again return to their blogs and podcasts and produce more regular content.

• Desktop Client Diet Struggle:  Thin Client computing, despite the best efforts of vendors, will continue to struggle in its adoption by companies.  There will be increased uptake though nowhere near the figures analysts and vendors have been predicting in the last few years. Towards the end of 2011 and the start of 2012 we will see Thin Client computing finally taking hold and see significant uptake.  This will coincide with more businesses finally taking the plunge into virtualizing a large portion of their infrastructure, their increased familiarisation with virtualization technology and their investment in new hardware,which they have been holding off in investing in during the recession, from which they will run both their vivrtualized server and desktop environment.
• VMware (still) Top of the Pops:  VMware vSphere will easily remain the defacto industry standard for virtualization hypervisors.  Microsoft will continue to trail though there will be couple of highly publicised mentions of large companies/institutions moving from VMware vSphere to Microsoft Hyper-V towards the end of 2011. 
• I See You: Video conferencing from PCs and hand held devices will continue in popularity greatly this year and will start making small in-roads to replacing audio only calls.  This technology will continue to gain significant traction over the next couple of years.  The  home consumer market will lead the charge though smaller businesses will also start using this form of video conferencing in a limited capacity.  Medium and larger companies will trail by about  12-18 months.
• Increase in Phone IQ:  Smart phone sales will increase significantly this year.
• Inevitable: I won’t win the lottery (though would very much like to, in case you know anyone that could ‘make’ this happen). 

It’s at this point I will finish things up for this blog post as it has grown into something much longer than originally anticipated.  I’m really amped about 2011 as it is no doubt going to be a full-on though fun year.   A massive thanks for all my readers and as always please drop me a line with any recommendations on how to improve the site.

Happy New Year and All the Best for 2011!

Simon