As we move into the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, people start thinking about wrapping up the current year and looking forward to what next year might have in store for us. A few of the open source industry analysts and other industry experts have started to post their predictions for 2010, and I thought that it might be fun to highlight a few of them. There are way too many predictions to highlight everything, so I’m going to stick to the cloud computing trends for 2010 in this post.

To state the obvious, cloud computing is going to be big in 2010 according to Gartner and just about every other analyst firm on the planet.

The cloud computing trend so obvious that Stephen O’Grady from Red Monk says that they “consider that a given”, and he moves right into more detailed predictions. He points out that cloud API proliferation will be a serious problem in 2010: “It’s not that open APIs are bad, individually: far from it. You’d rather have one than not. But how are customers to manage them as they multiply?” Nat Torkington at O’Reilly points out that this is a big opportunity for companies that can provide migration services between cloud providers. I’ve talked before about the importance of solutions that make it easy for companies to move between various cloud platforms; for example, Ubuntu and Red Hat are both starting down this path.

James Governor at Red Monk sees hybrid cloud and on premise models for the enterprise as a trend for 2010: “Hybrid is now just the reality of how we get things done. Just as open source began as a fringe activity, but captured the mainstream, so SaaS and Cloud are increasingly just an economic and technical reality. Cloud doesn’t replace on premise, it augments it. That said, the Big Cloud Backlash will be in full effect in 2010, after all the hype in 2009.”

Open source will have a big impact on cloud solutions in 2010. The 451 Group sees cloud computing, open data and the threat of platform lock-in as a “new battleground for FOSS in 2010 … In fact we have argued that we see open source as complementary to cloud computing and that open source has a role to play in reducing that lock-in.” Stephen O’Grady says, “Open source, building from its mainstream acceptance, will emerge as the most credible alternative to proprietary cloud and mobile platforms.” I expect to see even more open source solutions for the cloud in 2010 ranging from infrastructure to migration tools to cloud platforms.

What are your predictions for open source and cloud computing in 2010?

. Read the rest at Intel.com.