This is the summary of the EMA Report: Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center.

Organizations have long been frustrated with slow delivery of new applications and IT’s common lack of ability to optimally operate, manage and update these applications. Public cloud services have benefited greatly as a result, due to the perception that they are faster to deploy and easier to manage. But internal IT must respond as well. The concept of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) picked up tremendous traction in 2013 and it is safe to predict that the SDDC will become one of the dominating trends in enterprise IT in 2014. At the core of the SDDC is the belief that in order to better serve the business, IT infrastructure--internal and external--must be controlled centrally and become radically aligned along application and service requirements. Deploying, operating, managing and updating applications in the most cost-effective, secure, agile and policy-compliant manner is the key goal of the SDDC. Business units are exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on the IT department to accelerate this process, requiring IT to obtain new skills, such as "programming," and to focus on developing cross-domain expertise.

Study respondents identified "centralized management across a massively heterogeneous IT infrastructure," "repeatable configuration of software and infrastructure for optimal application deployment" and "orchestration and automation for application deployments across silos" as the core priorities on the journey to the SDDC today. Organizations indicated plans to rely on IT vendors for help in the form of professional consulting and implementation services in the areas of "legacy infrastructure integration" and improved "IT alignment with business requirements."

OpenStack, by the end of 2014, will be found within approximately half of IT departments within the EMA sample of early adopters. However, until business-critical use cases become more common for OpenStack deployments, EMA is unwilling to declare OpenStack the winner of the IaaS race.

In short, 2014 is the year of the SDDC and providing developers and applications owners with what they need to successfully deploy, operate and manage an ever-growing number of enterprise applications.