The cloud market is a relatively tumultuous one as it's still relatively young. Because of this, it's still fairly difficult to accurately predict how the market will grow and change even in the short term.
However, Vineet Jain, CEO at award-winning cloud file sharing infrastructure provider Egnyte, recently stated what he thinks will be the major themes in 2013 for the cloud market. Being that these are more guiding directions for the market than outright predictions, as well as Jain's expertise on the subject, it's pretty likely these themes will ring true.
First, Jain expects that IT is going to become even better in order to cope with the current tech revolution. This will include a new bred of IT professionals with MBAs and Product Management pedigrees, as well as tech knowledge.
Next, the classic recycling mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle" will start to become just as relevant to enterprises, only in the form of reducing costs and redundancies by turning to cloud solutions, reusing what has already been invested in, and recycling old ideas as they may prove more useful in the light of a better understanding of the cloud.
Jain also expects the year-long sales cycle to disappear as enterprises struggle to catch up with BYOD and other trends that dominated 2012. Other trends, though, he expects will recede, namely hybrid offerings, pointing out that with many consumer IPOs tanking, enterprise software designed to have a high ROI and business use will rise again to prominence.
Lastly, many businesses will move to separate data access from data location, allowing employees to better access information that has been locked down without issue.
“Predicting the next 12 months of movement in the tech industry is always difficult, but talking with many of our customers, it became clear that IT and the Enterprise stand front and center,” said Jain in a statement. “As we move from traditional enterprise product life cycles to steady streams of enhancements and new features, it’s inevitable that it will affect everything from sales cycles to implementation cycles and more."