Contributed article by Satyam Vaghani, Co-founder and CTO of PernixData

Things that will NOT Happen in Technology in 2014

With 2014 right around the corner, it's time for technology leaders to make their predictions for the year ahead. But PernixData's co-founder and CTO, Satyam Vaghani, decided to do things a little differently by predicting the things that will NOT happen in the coming 12 months. His UNpredictions are below...

Policy-based infrastructure will NOT move the needle enough for applications to optimize themselves

The Holy Grail for any IT executive is to optimize all of the applications throughout the company in a manner that is ideal for each individual application. Policy-based management of data center infrastructure is often touted as the way to achieve this. Unfortunately, we've not yet reached the point where policy engines are real enough to tweak infrastructure to meet application needs. Contrary to what vendors claim, we are not close to having policy-based, self-optimizing infrastructure that can adapt to the needs of each application it encounters.

Advice for 2014: Expect to spend a human capital optimizing the infrastructure for applications.

Big Data will NOT be easy in 2014. Every company wants to make faster, more intelligent business decisions by analyzing larger volumes and new types of data. However, the business logic, implementation, and success factors of big data solutions vary wildly between customers and industries. Consequently, big data has become more of a services business than a technology business. Don't expect an off-the-shelf solution to fit your business needs.

Advice for 2014: Big data has a lot of promise in terms of giving companies insight into their operations, customers and business. But expect to spend a lot of time, energy and money to understand and utilize big data, and even more to operationalize solutions around it.

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About the Author

Satyam Vaghani, Co-Founder and CTO of PernixData, was VMware's Principal Engineer and Storage CTO where he spent 10 years delivering fundamental storage innovations in vSphere. He is most known for creating the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) that set storage standard for server virtualization. He has authored 50+ patents, led industry-wide changes in storage systems and standards via VAAI, and has been a regular speaker at VMworld and other industry and academic forums. Satyam received his Masters in CS from Stanford and a Bachelors in CS from BITS Pilani.