'We expect customers to want to run mixed workloads and manage hybrid environments'

Strong adoption...Cloud Computing adoption grew strongly over 2012 as evidenced from the broad customer engagement levels in all geographies and segments. There was ample evidence of market size growth, higher forecasts, greater annual growth rates, and acceleration in sales cycles across both service providers and enterprise segments.

Future...We should see excellent continued momentum and growth of all manner of cloud computing activity. Private & public cloud infrastructure projects will drive sales of server hardware, infrastructure & orchestration software, networking & storage infrastructure, application investments and related services across the board.

We expect customers to want to run mixed workloads and manage hybrid environments - both traditional enterprise workloads and new "designed for the cloud" workloads concurrently in both their private and public data centers, fueling strong demand growth for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services. The growth in mobile devices, BYOD and consumerization of enterprise computing environments will provide even greater stimulus to this growth.

IT spend...IT spend in cloud related investment across all segments will be strong, particularly in education, transport, banking & insurance, media & communications and manufacturing. The tsunami of personal cloud technologies will continue unabated and drive very healthy growth in public facing consumer web, mobile and cloud offerings. Users will seek greater migration of on-premise & on-device apps, content and services to migrate directly into the cloud.

We will also start to see the early impacts of the "internet of things" with key technologies such as NFC, embedded sensors, image & speech recognition driving new areas of opportunity and creating insatiable demand for innovative new services. Organizations will increase adoption of Hadoop, NoSQL technologies, big data workloads, in-memory database & computing. They will invest in new analytics frameworks to help infer patterns and insight from their social, intent, consumption, interest, and mobility graph data sets. The number of active data warehouses and data sets in the enterprise environment will grow dramatically further fueling cloud related investments. Enterprise app stores, cloud service brokers, and shipment of software appliances all of which seek to reduce adoption friction and better integrate software stacks into ready to consume packaged offerings will prove very popular in the new year. Finally we will continue to see strong interest and innovation in technologies that help make the underlying fabric and infrastructure transform into a more flexible malleable "software defined" layer.

All manner of organizations from small SMBs to larger multi-national enterprises and service providers will continue to undergo a "cloud transformation." They will continue staffing and training initiatives to ensure the correct mix of skill sets and staffing is readily available to them in areas including cloud, security, mobile, big data, analytics, SaaS, networking expertise.