What’s ahead for 2016 in terms of cloud, IoT, big data, analytics, and open source technologies? IT executives gaze into their crystal balls, and offer their thoughts on the upcoming challenges and opportunities ahead in the coming year - and beyond.
As CIOs evaluate which cloud technologies make sense to implement when, one of the first moves they make is transitioning development-and-testing to the cloud. Cloud-based app development and testing is such a clear ROI opportunity that Oracle CEO Mark Hurd predicts it will be done entirely in the cloud by 2025. When dev-and-test is done using on-premises software and hardware, IT teams have to buy, license, and configure everything from servers to databases needed to create a development environment that hopefully matches the environment an app will someday run in production. Hurd estimates that work wastes about 80% of the resources spent on dev-test, not to mention slowing the work down. Cloud dev-and-test can still fit into the reality that cloud and on-premises systems will co-exist for many years to come. IT teams often want to develop-and-test in a cloud environment and then move an application back on-premises for production, often for regulatory reasons. Look for companies to choose cloud development platforms that give them the choice to either scale up in a public cloud or run on-premises, once the app’s production ready.
“The Internet of Things has already emerged as the next mega-trend but in 2016, it will excel beyond just hype,” says Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer. “We will see companies actively change their strategy and infrastructure to harness the power and insight of IoT technologies and data.”
Next-generation, software-based storage technology is enabling multi-temperature (fast and dense) solutions, observes MapR’s CEO and cofounder John Schroeder. In particular, he notes, flash memory is a key technology that will enable new design for products in the consumer, computer and enterprise markets. Moreover, consumer demand for flash will drive down its cost, and flash deployments in big data will begin to deploy. The optimal solution, according to Schroeder, will combine flash and disk to support both fast and dense configurations. In 2016, he says, look for a new generation of software-based storage that enables multi-temperature solutions to proliferate so organizations will not have to choose between fast and dense, and will be able to get both.
Many devices in the smart home are always on and always communicating. The connected home could become the simplest way to hack into people’s lives, according to Intel Security’s predictions on the future of cybercrime and security for 2016 and beyond in the McAfee Labs Threat Predictions Report. “The best hockey players navigate within the ice rink, grapple with opposing players, take advantage of opportunities when available, and, critically, as Wayne Gretzky said, always skate to where the puck is going to be—not where it has been,” stated Vincent Weafer, vice president of Intel Security’s McAfee Labs. “To address the business, technology and threat landscape realities facing them, we must help organizations get to where they need to be, using technologies that will enable and not hinder their businesses, and understand what kinds of threats could be confronting them tomorrow and far into the future.”
“Spark is part of Hadoop distributions and is widely associated with Hadoop. Expect to see that change in 2016 as Spark goes its own way, establishing a separate, vibrant ecosystem. In fact, you can expect to see the major cloud vendors release their own Spark PaaS offerings. Will we see an Elastic Spark? Good chance,” notes Bob Muglia, former president of Microsoft’s $16 billion server and tools business and current CEO of Snowflake, in a recent blog post. “It provides an efficient, general-purpose framework for parallel execution.
