Now that the year has turned, it seems like everyone and their mother is making predictions for 2008. And although we aren’t great believers in me-too tactics at Nixu Software, I thought I’d put my two cents in as well. After all, extrapolating trends is a nice excercise. How I’d love to be an analyst!

Talking about analysts, 2007 saw a huge increase in the number of research firms talking about software appliances: Forrester, Gartner, IDC as well as a number of smaller analyst firms all started talking about the great promise of software appliances. And for a good reason too. Considering the evolving complexities associated with OSs of today, the increasing popularity of software as a service (SaaS), and the fact that virtualization is expected to gain some serious traction during 2008 – not least because of Microsoft’s Hyper-V that will be included in Windows Server 2008 sometime in H2 2008 – software appliances offer a hugely attractive proposition to entities in all walks of organizational life whether large, small or somewhere in between. This will also mark the end of the OS dependant world as we know it, as organizations can start running Linux-based software appliances on Windows servers without having to bother maintaining the underlying Linux OSs themselves.

Since launching the world’s first DNS software appliance in October 2006, followed by DHCP and DNS/IPAM software appliances in 2007, this is also what we at Nixu Software have been witnessing. The number of downloads has been climbing steadily quarter over quarter and it looks like we’ll be seeing more of the same during 2008. This is largely caused by the fact that once organizations have invested in and committed to virtual computing environments, they must start rolling out applications and network services on those platforms to show ROI. And as software appliances offer the best bang for the buck when deployed in virtual environments, we are going to see more and more organizations running software appliances in them. Further, as it happens, I have this little theory that the number of virtualized computing environments could actually be construed as a leading indicator for the popularity of software appliances. Considering how much has been said on virtualization during 2007, it could well be that software appliances follow the suit in 2008 and beyond.