As the calendars have officially turned to 2013, we’re in for a fresh year of technology innovation, announcements and changes in trends. Before we embark on another exciting year, it’s also good to take a step back and reflect on what happened in 2012 and what we can learn from it.

XS International, an IT services company that specializes in cross-platform OEM and alternative IT maintenance, data center consolidation, data center relocation, IT asset disposition and IT hardware and software sales, certainly had a year worth looking back on. It played a part in the London 2012 Olympics, providing IT networking solutions to Aldea Solutions Inc., a provider of broadcast quality video services and solutions for television, film and media industries, which used the HP switches to support its clients during the Games.

For the second year in a row, XS International was ranked on Inc. magazine’s sixth annual Inc. 500|5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. XSi was ranked No. 4337, joining Yelp (News - Alert), Chobani, Giftcards.com, KIND and Tilly’s, among other prominent brands.

In other exciting news in 2012, the company was awarded a five-year extension on its U.S. General Services Administration (GSA (News - Alert)) IT Schedule 70 GS-35F-0751M, entering its 11th year as a GSA contract holder, with its new contract period ending September 2, 2017.

The alternative IT services provider also announced new products in 2012, including storage products, Juniper maintenance, Brocade (News - Alert) maintenance, F5 maintenance and data center moves.

“XSi is always looking for way to better serve our customers. We saw a need in our customers for storage so we added it to our line of products,” explained Jennifer Cano, marketing communications manager at XS International.

One particular technology that was introduced in 2012 and will definitely be prominent in 2013 is software defined networking, which is changing the way data centers run and is predicted to become a $2 billion market by 2016.

According to an XS International blog post, the SDN concept has been around for several years now, but never really caught much attention until VMware acquired Nicira, which is the front-runner in SDN right now.

“Software defined networking is sure to be a crowded field as everyone hunts for their piece of the pie,” the company said in the blog post. “Look for software defined networking to be the hottest topic in data center networking for 2013. You can expect vendors to continue racing to either build their own SDN technology or acquire it. The big players are not going to be left behind and huge budgets are likely to be thrown at the technology.  Only time will tell who will take the biggest chunk of pie.”

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