Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Complexity and costs will come to a head in 2023
By Yan Ness, CEO of Verge.io
Acquisitions cause angst – VMware, potentially Nutanix…others disrupt the industry. Customers remember what acquirers did to other acquired companies. This is a natural course of highly successful tech companies and has been happening forever, but when the acquisition is of core infrastructure it is much more disruptive to IT than an outlier utility.
The continued demand and growth for all things IT and data is causing an increase in demand on staff. As IT infrastructure becomes more complex those demands are growing exponentially.
The cloud is expensive at scale – Customers need to focus on unit economic costs. The cloud will become increasingly expensive as the era of cheap money came to an end in 2022.
So, what’s ahead for 2023?
1. Mass digitization is still accelerating (and will continue to do so)
- Data creation, data consumption, staff and OPEX costs, and cost of capital will create significant pressure on CIOs and, ultimately the bottom lines of everyone. It’s the data’s fault.
- No one has less data or computing needs than last year, never has or ever will. When does it plateau? Has anyone heard of Metaverse? The need for more compute, and more data will accelerate.
- Cost-of-capital constraints may limit investment, but the rapid consumption and distribution of data will not. The rate of data created is no longer dependent on economic conditions.
2. Computing will be more and more distributed
- Latency will require we spread the ability to run workloads as we spread peanut butter on a piece of bread – easily and evenly to the Edge, Core Data Center and Cloud
- Your phone will do more of the work than the cloud. It’ll have to because the sum of 1 billion phones will out-compute all the data centers.
3. Capital constraints will continue, and CIO’s will seek more cost controls
- CAPEX is expensive as ever, and so are staff. Organizations need something that runs on cheaper hardware and requires less staff. This will be especially true as workloads need to run further and further away from a data center.
4. Complexity will come to a head for the public cloud (big one)
- We will need new, innovative ways to better leverage software to deliver cloud-like capabilities, everywhere, in a much simpler way. The new FinOps career path is evidence that the cloud has become too complex. It’s ironic that FinOps salaries, overhead, and tools will need to be added to the cost structure of the public cloud for an accurate TCO analysis.
- Microsoft Windows commoditized computing and put it on the laps and in the hands of everyone. Before that, only hobbyists and experts used computers. Ken Olsen, the former CEO of Digital (DEC), famously said, “why would anyone need a computer in a home?”. The cost of computing entered a paradigm shift with Windows and the PC. It’s time for the same disruption to “cloud computing”.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yan Ness is CEO of Verge.io. VergeIO is the first and only ultra-converged infrastructure (UCI) solution, unifying the three data center layers (compute, networking and storage) into a single cohesive cloud operating system.
