The New Year is about renewal. It’s a clean slate for progress and a new opportunity to put things on track and set aside the messiness of the previous year. 2008 ends at an interesting time — overall, the mood somber, but behind that, there’s a quiet hopefulness. Many see opportunity on the horizon, but even the widest-eyed optimists are unsettled by the stark reality of a recession and an uncertain business climate. What’s in store for 2009? As we turn the page to the next year, I wanted to offer my predictions as they relate to the worlds of virtualization and cloud.

Offered in no particular order:

1.) The Hypervisor Goes Vertical

Analysts predict that hypervisors will soon become the primary boot option for new server infrastructure. This may be at odds with hardware vendors’ goals of selling more servers, but the hypervisor is one of those truly disruptive innovations that can’t be wished away — it’s here to stay because it delivers unmistakable value to customers. Carving up server capacity offers serious improvements in infrastructure utilization and major reductions in capital and operating expense. This is music to any CFO’s ears, and it’s the primary reason that hypervisor penetration will increase decidedly in 2009.

2) Enterprise Application Virtualization Emerges

“The Deployment Gap” is the space and time between application development and production operations. It used to take forever or longer to deploy new application functionality because of an inherent friction in the process — the process of pairing hardware with software has always been manual and cumbersome from start to finish. The hypervisor takes the friction out of the hardware side, but the software side of the equation is largely unchanged. Taking application snapshots is an ad hoc approach to an inherently systematic problem. Today’s enterprise applications are complex, interdependent and ever changing. This is why, in 2009, we’ll see enterprises getting serious about an architecture for managing virtualized application workloads, ensuring control of the creation, deployment and change of these applications across their lifecycle and providing a scalable onramp to virtualized application deployment and management.

3) Virtual Machine Sprawl is the New Hell

Web Services Hell, Configuration Hell — we’ve been here before. The rapid proliferation of one-offs that occurs independent of a systematic process for management and control is not a new phenomenon. Today, some 25% of application workload is delivered as VMs. That’s pretty impressive, but I believe we’ll see huge growth in the volume of virtual machines over the next year. The rapid deployment advantage of virtual applications will lead to chaotic, unmanaged proliferation — the virtual machine tsunami — swamping the legacy, horizontal system management approaches and transferring the problem from applications to operations. Virtualization and cloud are a freight train fueled by a down economy. Few organizations are counting on incremental IT resources next year — but application workload delivered as virtual machines will grow exponentially in 2009, and the cost and complexity of managing and maintaining the virtual machine sprawl is poised to explode. While this is good news for business agility by taking the friction out of application deployment, it spells potential disaster for IT operations. This is why VM sprawl will be one of the most urgent, hair-on-fire challenges of 2009.

4) Rogue Applications Leak to the Cloud

Risk abounds for IT operations as application workload finds the path of least resistance for deployment in external clouds. We’ll see Amazon EC2 demand continue to skyrocket as an escape valve for lines of business who sidestep IT in order to deploy applications more rapidly. These rogue deployments will put backpressure on IT ops to create their own internal cloud or to provide a management framework that ensures control of applications in Amazon EC2 and other external clouds. The reality is that most IT departments have not yet found a way to consistently say “yes” to requests for new capacity because of capital spending constraints and high friction processes for getting applications into production. As a result, rouge applications will leak to the cloud at an accelerated rate in 2009.

5) The CIO Gets a Cloud Mandate

All of these predications add up to one final capstone prediction for 2009: CIOs will get a true mandate for cloud computing. The confluence of economic malaise, the need for speed, the risk factors of VM sprawl, and the emergence of a high-profile proof point in Amazon EC2 will put pressure on CIOs in 2009 to develop a comprehensive strategy for transforming IT as a cloud-based service. Of course this transformation won’t happen overnight. 2009 will be about incremental, stepwise investments to cloud and a systematic architectural approach to virtualized application deployment and management. Cloud is an IT elephant, and the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

So, join me in the old refrain, as we prepare to ring in 2009, the Year of the Cloud:

Should old acquaintances be forgotten,

And never brought to mind?

Should old acquaintances be forgotten,

And days of long ago!

Keep me honest on the accuracy of my predictions. Let me know if you think I got it right today, or “on the other side,” once history is on our side.

All the best,

Jake