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Editor’s Note: This post is part of SiliconANGLE’s “Predictions and Reflections” series. To view this year’s collection, click here. To participate, create an account or log into “TheANGLE” and request to join the group. –mrh / spa]

The other day I posted 2009 – Ken’s Year in Review and promised I’d follow up with this requisite annual blogger’s rite, my look ahead. There may be some bumps in the road and unexpected twists here, so hang on dear reader. Put your tray table in the upright and locked position, raise your seat back and make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened. I’ve never been particularly shy or softspoken about my look at the future, and I probably won’t be now.

Disclaimer: These are my opinions alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of any employer past or present, my lovely partner Sheryl, the companies named herein, or anyone else on the planet. Your opionions and mileage may vary widely. Cheap shot comments will be tossed into the abyss, but open conversation and debate is always welcome.

Early in 2009 I predicted it was going to be the year Cisco took a big black eye. I agree, that didn’t happen. Instead they’ve taken a light bruising all year long. 2009 was a year when Cisco excelled at absolutely nothing that mattered in the market in my view. They were vanilla custard and simply didn’t matter in the market. They got off easy, and in 2010 they won’t. I said a black eye in 2009. I’ll predict a savage beating in 2010, the likes of which they’ve never felt before. I bet you’re curious where, aren’t you?

First in unified communications and VoIP space. I’d say Cisco is going to get their lunch eaten by multiple players. The Cisco solution set is pretty decent (Call Manager and the like), although their phones are forgettable. It won’t matter. I think they’ll get beaten repeatedly by Lucent, Asterisk, Mitel, and others. Even IBM, yes IBM, will cause pain for Cisco. 2010 will be the year Cisco learns how much they don’t know about telecommunications. It will be a bitter pill to swallow.

They bought Pure Digital for the Flip and they’re about to get a bunch of hype for the new Flip with built-in WiFi. I give that buzz six weeks and then they’ll take a good old fashioned, bare knuckles ass whuppin from the likes of Kodak’s Zi8 and a handful of others. More importantly, the current generation of cameras built in to mobile phones, notably iPhone and Blackberry, are likely to shift up taking another huge bite out of the whole dedicated camera market.

Then there’s Cisco’s core business – switching and routing. Coupled with some repercussions of the recent Starent acquisition and Juniper getting serious about the market, I expect some big moves in this space. Juniper will play big and strong. The big dog, Cisco, is going to get rocked back on their heels in some major networking deals in 2010. People will start to think about other options more often before simply choosing Cisco.

Oh, and John Chambers, the Rupert Murdoch of networking, will finally move on. I’ve seen his leadership at Cisco as ineffective in recent years and I expect him to move on, flying off with his golden parachute.

Of course there’s Microsoft, the Gorgon with more snakes in its head than Medusa. (Yes, the irony of Gorgons being female is intentional, for a reason…read on). I expect more layoffs at MS. Significantly more. Microsoft is still a very fat company, with plenty of trimming to do. In 2010, I think they’ll do some in the right areas. They’ve missed the mark a time or two with cutbacks, and some course corrections will happen this year. OCS will do well, especially against Cisco. Momentum will gain there.

If Microsoft’s a gorgon, Google is a Chimera, breathing fire, part search engine, part cloud service, part telco, part alchemist. (Perhaps an interesting sidenote: The Chimera’s tail ended in a snake’s head. Something to consider.) Google has a multitude of businesses and a serious problem. They have huge opportunity, but some days I wonder if they have the nerve to go for it. Google’s an 800 pound gorilla who seems afraid to rock the boat. Rather, they telegrahp five years in advance that they’re thinking of rocking the boat. I think 2010 will be the year that changes. They have several segments in play right now.

irst there’s Google Wave. It’s hit the market with a soft thud, but it’s still in early beta. I think they gave too much hype to something that isn’t going to hit mainstream for at least five years. Then again,  recall when Gmail came out of beta. Wave has potential, but right now it’s simply the geek developers playground. Google Wave is a sandbox. I don’t expect it to be anything but a sandbox for quite some time to come. Until Wave is fully integrated with GoogleTalk, Gmail, GoogleDocs and the rest of the suite, it can only be a playground for geeks and developers, regardless of whether your company can make your own wave or not. Lots of lead time on this concept, so if you haven’t started, you’re not too late. If you have started, you’re way early.

Google Latitude, is an interesting concept. It’s one that I think Google will tie in to mapping at some point. It integrates with Google Maps today. The recent tracking option to remember where you’ve been is clearly a shot across the bow of the GPS market. That’s where Google seems to be headed. I don’t think they grasp the significance of presence, availability and location in one app or they’d have integrated with GoogleTalk. Missed opportunity, and they’ll probably continue to miss and fall behind in location based services in 2010. They’re big and powerful enough they can still recover over the course ot their standard half-decade development cycle, so don’t count them out. Just don’t expect them to deliver a solid LBS solution in 2010.

The biggest opportunity Google has is with Google Voice (formerly Grand Central), perhaps with some integration of the stuff they bought up with the Gizmo acquisition. There’s a problem here, and it’s a Google cultural barrier. They’ve got this “do no evil” image they’d like to protect. They don’t understand that when it comes to investors and profit, there are degrees of evil that your investors and customers will accept. They try, but sometimes a little evil slips into the mix. For Google to make a real play in telecommunications, they have to take the gloves off and get down and dirty in a biting, hair pulling, crotch kicking knife fight with some of the dirtiest fighters in history, the telephone companies. And Google is already the underdog in the eyes of the referees, legislators and the FCC. Because the referees are the cronies and lackeys of the incumbents. I only say that because it’s true, and after thirty years in the industry, I’m pretty sure I’m right.

And now for some highlights.

I think the hot acquisition of the year will be Voxeo, assuming they take the deal. It will be big. I think Voxeo’s worth significantly more than Twitter. I expect someone to make a play for Voxeo that’s well into significant nine figures. And it will be worth it. The deal of the decade for me? Call it a fantasy deal. Let Google step up to the 800 pound gorilla who wants to play hardball and buy Voxeo for $300M, integrate within 120 days and go live and strong with a significant telecommunications solution from top to bottom, enterprise to consumer. They could be the biggest telecom provider in the world in the space of a year if they pulled the right leadership team and strategy together. Will they? Let’s watch. I think not, but they could disrupt the telecom industry more than anyone in history. I’d like to see it. Voxeo’s a company I’d like to work for or with.

I’ve said a few times recently that location based services are on the rise. I think Foursquare is going to shake out as a big winner in the space. I recently wrote about Mainstreaming Location Based Servicesand I expect this white-hot market segment to heat up even more. Foursquare has a Blackberry app in development, with some early beta testers. Sheryl and I aren’t among them, but I’m reaching out to the Foursquare team with some ideas. Suggestions to some startups fall on deaf ears. I don’t think that will be the case at Foursquare. They’re riding on popularity and buzz, not ego. These three guys are going to be very rich, and I think by year-end 2010 they’ll own the LBS space and be growing even stronger. If they make the right moves, Foursquare will be sneaking into mainstream and business use by the end of 2010 and somebody will be looking to acquire Foursquare for a substantial chunk of change. Foursquare is another company I’d like to work with.

I’d like to predict some excitement in the mobile space, but I don’t see it on the horizon. I think there may be another iteration of the iPhone. Rumors are floating. I think it will be an incremental update. I think RIM will continue incrementally updating the Blackberry without a major win in consumer space. I think Nokia will release at least 52 new phones next year, one for each each week, but not blockbuster hits. And the droids still won’t be the ones we’re looking for at the end of 2010 in my view. Oh, and Windows Mobile will still make us WinCE in pain, although I expect Microsoft will try to do something to link it more tightly to Windows 7.

In the industry analyst space, I expect to see a couple of the major firms have less-than-notable years. I think Forrester and Gartner will both have a bit of a rough time. Conversely, I think Frost and Sullivan will have a banner year. I also think it’s going to be a year for independent analysts. Those of us who do this out of passion for the industry, without personal or financial bias, will find ourselves winning more often. That’s good news. I expect some significant highlights here actually.

The Language of 2010
We’ll see some terminology shift in 2010. Just as Gartner removed unified communications from their list of hot topics for 2010, I think we’ll see that phrase start to fade. Unified communications, Software Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Services (SaaS) Communications Enhanced Business Processes (CEBP) and mashup (blech!) all need to fade and be replaced by real expectations (market demand for solutions that work instead of buzzwords). I think we’ll see that start to happen.

Social media is one of the most abused, misused, inaccurate terms ever coined. Most of what we see is social marketing, not social media. In 2010 we’ll see more social, less media. More marketing with marketers starting to call it what it is. They all want the hype, spin and buzz. There will, unfortunately be more chaff, but there will be more meat. As reputable firms beging to figure it out, there will be more overall goodness in this space. But there will be more stupidity too.

In 2010, real expertise will win out and the independent advisors will get some real recognition as the mouthpieces and tools in the industry get noticed for what they are. For example, Sheryl coined the phrase engagement specialist almost two years ago. She and I have talked about the criticality of reciprocity and engagement for a long time. That isn’t fluff any more, and as we survey independent advisors, the value they bring to business is being seen. Businesses understand that old school, whether it’s marketing, PR, mailing lists (spam) or marcoms simply isn’t effective in the world of NOW media.

I think that’s enough, and I didn’t even get started on traditional media. So as a parting shot for this long post, traditional media will continue to decline, but journalism, real journalism will rise in both visibility and integrity. And people like Rupert Murdoch will be the catalysts in the slide of traditional media into the abyss of the dead media pool.

Want more? Drop me a note, leave a comment or send me a tweet.

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Google (GOOG) has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data center management.

Chillers, which are used to refrigerate water, are widely used in data center cooling systems but require a large amount of electricity to operate. With the growing focus on power costs, many data centers are reducing their reliance on chillers to improve the energy efficiency of their facilities.

This has boosted adoption of “free cooling,” the use of fresh air from outside the data center to support the cooling systems. This approach allows data centers to use outside air when the temperature is cool, while falling back on chillers on warmer days.

Google has taken the strategy to the next level. Rather than using chillers part-time, the company has eliminated them entirely in its data center near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, which began operating in late 2008 and also features an on-site water purification facility that allows it to use water from a nearby industrial canal rather than a municipal water utility.

Year-Round Free Cooling
The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The averagetemperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.

So what happens if the weather gets hot? On those days, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers. This approach is made possible by the scope of the company’s global network of data centers, which provide the ability to shift an entire data center’s workload to other facilities.

In a March interview, Urs Holzle, Google’s Senior Vice President of Operations, said the company typically uses manual tools to manage data center level outages and downtime.  “Teams regularly practice failing out of or routing around specific data centers as part of scheduled maintenance,” he said. “Sometimes we need to build new tools when new classes of problems happen.”

Redirecting Workloads Instantly
At last month’s Structure 09 conference, Google’s Vijay Gill hinted that the company has developed automated tools to manage data center heat loads and quickly redistribute workloads during thermal events (a topic covered by The Register).

“You have to have integration with everything right from the chillers down all the way to the CPU,” said Gill, Google’s Senior Manager of Engineering and Architecture. “Sometimes, there’s a temperature excursion, and you might want to do a quick load-shedding to prevent a temperature excursion because, hey, you have a data center with no chillers. You want to move some load off. You want to cut some CPUs and some of the processes in RAM.”

Gill was asked if this was a technology Google is using today. “I could not possibly comment on that,” Gill replied.

Look Ma: No Chillers!
But Google engineers had already disclosed the existence of the chiller-less Belgium data center at the Google Data Center Efficiency Summit in April in Mountain View, Calif. At the event, we asked specifically: are there chillers on-site that are rarely used, or no chillers at all?

The answer: no chillers at all. The facility will rely entirely on free cooling, and redirect workload on days when it’s too hot to operate. This approach makes local weather an issue in network management, although advanced forecasting can help Google anticipate days when it may need to divert work from the Belgium facility.

Nonetheless, even Google is periodically challenged by rerouting entire data centers, as seen in a February Gmail outage when a data center was overloaded while shifting workloads. Traffic redirection was also an issue in abrief outage in May.

An Enabler for “Follow the Moon”?
The ability to seamlessly shift workloads between data centers also creates intriguing long-term energy management possibilities, including a “follow the moon” strategy which takes advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. In this scenario, virtualized workloads are shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates.

This approach has been discussed by cloud technologists Geva Perry and James Urquhart as a strategy for cloud computing providers with global data networks, who could offer a “follow-the-moon” service to enterprise customers who would normally build data centers where power is cheap. But this approach could also produce energy savings for a single company with a global network – someone like Google.

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Google Inc is planning a direct attack on Microsoft Corp’s core business by taking on the software giant’s globally dominant Windows operating system for personal computers. Google, which already offers a suite of e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft, said it would launch a new operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.

Called the Google Chrome Operating System, the new software will be in netbooks for consumers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was working with multiple manufacturers. Netbooks are low-cost notebook PCs optimized for Internet surfing and other Web-based applications.

“It’s been part of their culture to go after and remove Microsoft as a major holder of technology, and this is part of their strategy to do it,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. “This could be very disruptive. If they can execute, Microsoft is vulnerable to an attack like this, and they know it,” he said.

Google and Microsoft have often locked horns over the years in a variety of markets, from Internet search to mobile software. It remains to be seen if Google can take market share away from Microsoft on its home turf, with Windows currently installed in more than 90 percent of the world’s PCs.

The news comes as executives from the world’s biggest technology and media companies, including Google and Microsoft, gather in Sun Valley, Idaho for an annual conference organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.

A spokesman for Microsoft had no immediate comment. Key to success will be whether Google can lock in partnerships with PC makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, which currently offer Windows on most of their product lines.

HP, the world’s largest PC brand, declined to confirm if it would sell PCs running on the new operating system. “We are looking into it,” said HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak, referring to the operating system. “We want to understand all the different operating systems available to customers, and will assess the impact of Chrome on the computer and communications industry.”

Google’s Chrome Internet browser, launched in late 2008, remains a distant fourth in the Web browser market, with a 1.2 percent share in February, according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues to dominate with nearly 70 percent.

FAST AND LIGHTWEIGHT

The new Chrome OS is expected to work well with many of the company’s popular software applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps. It will be fast and lightweight, enabling users to access the Web in a few seconds, Google said. The new OS is based on open-source Linux code, which allows third-party developers to design compatible applications.

“The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, said in the blog post. The Chrome OS is “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

Google said Chrome OS was a new project, separate from its Android mobile operating software found in some smartphones. Acer Inc, the world’s No.3 PC brand, has already agreed to sell netbooks that run on Android to be released this quarter.

The new OS is designed to work with ARM and x86 chips, the main chip architectures in use in the market. Microsoft has previously said it would not support PCs running on ARM chips, allowing Google an opportunity to infiltrate that segment.

Charlene Li, partner at consulting company Altimeter Group, said Google’s new OS could initially appeal to consumers looking for a netbook-like device for Web surfing, rather than people who use desktop PCs for gaming or high-powered applications. But eventually, the Google OS has the potential to scale up to larger, more powerful PCs, especially if it proves to run faster than Windows, she said.

Google did not say how much it would charge for the operating system (OS), but Enderle expects Google to charge at most a nominal fee or make it free, saying the company’s business model has been to earn revenue from connecting applications or advertising.

Microsoft declines to say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but most analysts estimate about $20 for the older XP system and at least $150 for the current Vista system. Li added: “A benefit to the consumer is that the cost saving is passed on, not having to pay for an OS.” “It’s clearly positioned as a shot across the bow of Microsoft,” she said.

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The new products include two new connectors for the Google Search Appliance to enable it to work better with major content management systems as well as data from cloud sites like Salesforce.com and a new service called Side-by-Side, that gives employees greater control over search results.

Side-by-Side lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data, to see which gives better results.

Employees can then vote on their preferred results, by choosing the Policy A or B buttons, and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business.

In terms of Google Search Appliances’ new connectors, Google has unveiled connector updates for major content management systems as well as a connector for Saleforce.com data.

GSA can search and provide employees access to the internal Salesforce info they need in search results. Connectors integrate data from all different kinds of file and content systems (like SharePoint, FileNet, Documentum) so an employee searching their company intranet can see a single, unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a wide variety of company data systems.

“Enterprise search is about the fundamentals: organizing information so that people can do their jobs more easily,” said Michael Parker of Google’s engineering team on the company’s official blog.

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