Well, its the season for predictions and we are on time rolling out our Trend spotting dice for the new year 2012. I saw this list from IBM which predicts trends out for next 5 years !

With big blue on their side, who are we to dispute that call ? A lot more has been said from various quarters for sure by now, but we simply had to throw our hat in the ring and add our 5 cents on the tech sector. So, here are our top five spinners for 2012.

1. Our Business Edition scores with SMB- The much whispered and soon to be baptized Business edition of Zukmo will blaze a trail in the SMB space. In fact, we envision our journey in 2012 to be toeing the lines of a similarly attempted voyage of an ‘Enterprise’ by borrowing from their famous observations.

“Cloud, the final frontier. These are the new deployments of our service Zukmo. Her one-year mission: to explore all SMB markets, seek out new segments, tap old channels and to boldly go where no Dropbox or Box has ever gone before.”

2. Hybrid clouds gather – Hybrid cloud pours cold water on the currently hot debate on whether on premise gets beat up by cloud or vice versa. MSPs dont fret the headlines this year. In 2012, after all the pros and the cons have evened out, everyone (on premise, public cloud, private cloud) and their grandmother will live happily ever after under one hybrid roof. The agility and scalability of cloud computing will not be outdone by the concerns over security, compliance, interoperability and vendor lock-in. Hence the hybrid settlements.

3. Desktop is dressed to kill: Desktop catwalks the ramp as a Size Zero model out-fashioning the thin client hipsters and will be the rage on stage for the first part of the year. we mean those derivatives of HP t5335z and t5565z will start looking up. But then sales will go anorexic once the hype cycle turns down and users begin to understand it still needs firmware upgrades to experience the future enhancements.

4. Big Data gets busted for nothing: Big Data, that untamed bully and cynosure of all eyes will certainly succumb to the elephantine crush of rising methodologies. However, results of successfully processing all that big data will deliver only reality checks and leave you wondering if you were Haduped ! The new question arises “Is humongous amount of data worth at all for harvesting precious insights or does it simply cloud the picture ?“ or rather the old question resurfaces “ will Eureka moments still be experienced in bathtubs ?”

5. A nursery rhyme is born. Doc now says “A million tablets a day will keep all the desktops sales away”

In case, none of this works out, we wont be a tad bothered.Since the goal has been always to

Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

We intend to make Zukmo the go-to-destination of all the important content that you discover anywhere. Initially, we got started by enabling our users to bookmark any web content of interest to them and then be able to search for the same at leisure within their own Zukmo space. However, bookmarking marks only the begininng of our endeavours and we are intensly planning to cut across a broad swathe of the digital content spectrum that users are likely to keep in their crosshairs.

Soon, you would be able to save, search and share all kinds of information from many desired sources of content. This would include a broad array such as Facebook & Twitter Streams, Desktop Documents, Google Apps, Emails, Video/Audio streams, RSS feeds, Web Clippings, Notes and much more. Further, we will be also adding support for such premier smart device platforms such as Android, iPhone and iPad etc. by building user friendly search and retieve apps that can be dowloaded into the respective mobile devices.

Given the direction we are going, we want to clarify that we are neither competing purely in the space of social bookmarking nor do we wish to add redundancy to existing cloud storage services. Our service will clearly be distinguished to aid as a personal digital memory for our time conscious and information flooded users who wish to quickly capture their online and desktop experiences for later consumption. Also, we will execute in a manner where content remains in sole possesion unless explicity shared by the user and we prefer not to compromise on the model of privacy being dictated by the user. We will however plan on providing a more comprehensive platform that will enable sharing and colloboration on documents within a group created and designated by the user.

Zukmo is meant to serve as a simple and supportive extension to the users for both capturing the designated information in a variety of contexts and hosting that selected crux of their online experience in the cloud. We envision a future where our users could dig out any content of importance to them from anywhere (i.e through browser or desktop or mobile devices) and continually add it to their personal library in the cloud. Then they could simply tune into their personal Zukmo space or “My Zukmo’ once again from anywhere to find all the relevant content that they have gathered diligently by leveraging its rich full-text and attribute based search capabilities. The core features of Zukmo are thus meant to enhance the productivity of the users, assist in the readability of content, promote the interactive sharing of content between private groups and provide for a secure cloud based content vault.

We have our work clearly cut out for us in terms of vastly expanding the scope of support in Zukmo and all future changes to our product and updates will be henceforth reflective of the core vision shared in this post. Currently, a major release has been slated during this week loaded with new features and we urge you to stay tuned to us on the exciting developments.

We have always believed that the Cloud would be a valuable addition to an MSP’s arsenal – and we went about supporting Amazon Cloud services precisely because of that.  This enabled our partners to either operate their entire backup service out of Amazon’s EC2/S3 services or simply leverage S3 storage service for the offsite replication.  And we are sure glad we were able to see the business value this brought to MSPs early on and be among the first to adopt this crucial step in the backup/storage industry.

The concepts of substance and form always been closely examined since historical times.    Steve DuPlessie (of ESG fame) gave a unique twist to this age-old ‘form vs. substance’ conundrum with this incisive post on the Cloud here -

Surely, the Cloud is a very convenient ‘construct’ – so much so that it took a lot of time for the industry and analysts to even pin down a definition for the Cloud!   Steve makes two significant points in this post – one, that ‘being’ a Cloud is a sure way to failing in the long run (after a great round A valuation, of course ) and two, that ‘using’ the Cloud for viable solutions will be better off than those masquerading AS the Cloud.

The Cloud ‘form’ became very important for all those who sought to ride the media wave when the Cloud started getting a whole lot of media attention last year.  I noticed several BU/DR firms started sporting the term ‘Cloud Backups’.  This was funny since none of them had even the basic characteristics of cloud computing (like scalablilty (on the scale of the Amazon Cloud),  true pay-for-what-you-use model, etc.) – features which can only come through actual seamless integration of a backup solution with a Cloud service provider.

I believe that the ‘substance’ of the Cloud is what counts for a service provider – the solution to her client’s problem that makes business sense for her to provide.  Not all the ‘form’ – backup players sporting websites with ‘Cloud’ strewn all over – the proverbial new bottle for their old wine.

Vembu StoreGrid has provided a perfect platform for MSPs to USE the Cloud where it makes perfect business sense.  Case in point, offsite replication from StoreGrid to Amazon’s dependable S3 storage service costs less than 50cents/GB/month*.  Before this, MSPs were used to spending ridiculous amounts to get offsite storage services of questionable security with no scalability or pay-for-use model.

We still see a lot of backup players going gung-ho about Cloud related terms for their backup solutions – Public Clouds (as opposed to what?), Hybrid Clouds (an umbrella term meant to cover all they wished were a Cloud, but wasn’t)…. and so on.

I see that when the dust settles on the Cloud phenomenon, MSPs will be quick to see what is getting passed of as ‘Cloud Backups’ to them.  I think the day when the skies will clear is not far off and all undeserved ‘Cloud Backup’ terms in several websites will be off in a jiffy!

* – As of  1st Feb 2010.  Please check the latest AWS pricing here.

The above post was written by Gokul Sriram of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.