PaperShare: VDI, Hybrid Clouds and Licensing Hottest Cloud Topics

PaperShare, a startup that aims to become the first so-called social content network for business and IT pros to swap cloud and virtualization whitepapers, has released its inaugural quarterly PaperShare Index for Cloud and Virtualization. Its findings: In the fourth quarter of 2011, the hottest topics in cloud computing have been virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), hybrid clouds and licensing.

The way the index works is actually pretty simple — PaperShare already contains more than 31,000 items, so spotting emerging trends is as simple as seeing the most-posted and most-shared topics, according to the press release.

According to PaperShare, the reason for the interest in VDI is easily explained: Goldman Sachs invested $70 million in VDI provider AppSense with the expectation that the market would balloon to $1.5 billion by 2014, eventually hitting $2 billion. As such, vendors including Citrix, Quest Software, Microsoft, VMware and Cisco Systems were the topics of much discussion, with more than 400 VDI-based items shared more than 5,000 times on PaperShare.

Meanwhile, according to PaperShare, Gartner believes “at year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud.” As such, hybrid cloud solutions that bridge public and private clouds are on the rise. On this matter, 300 different pieces of literature — especially those provided by the likes of Amazon, Citrix, DynamicOps, Microsoft and VMware — drove 3,500 shares overall and 100 comments and shares per day.

The last hot topic PaperShare called attention to was the efficient usage of application licenses in virtualized environments. After all, when you’re provisioning and de-provisioning VMs in the cloud rapid-fire, you need to make sure you don’t overbuy and spend your entire budget, but you don’t want to buy less than you need and risk going out of compliance. To that end, 3,000 papers on the topic of cloud and virtualization licensing have been shared this quarter.

Longtime TalkinCloud readers may recall PaperShare is helmed by Microsoft cloud veteran Dave Greschler, so it’s no wonder he continues to keep a close eye on this market — or that PaperShare is seeing such opportunity in it. Hopefully, cloud service providers will take PaperShare’s findings under consideration.