Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Derek Collison, Neeraj Gupta and Josh Ellithorpe, Apcera

2016 Predictions For The Future Of Enterprise Cloud

Machine Learning Will Transform How Enterprises View and Utilize Data

Humans today are built with 50,000-year-old hardware that is programmed to think linearly, not exponentially. This limitation means that we are simply going to be blown away by the looming advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since businesses are generating more data than they can ever process, these technologies, perfected by the companies like Google and Facebook, will quickly find their way into the mainstream enterprise. Machine Learning, and not what we think of as Big Data today, will provide the insights, predictions, causations and correlations that will drive the modern enterprise within the next two years.

- Derek Collison, Founder and CEO

The Clash of the Titans

Docker's continuing march up the stack to the management layer is going to bring it into direct conflict with other popular projects (for example, Kubernetes) and products that depend on Docker container runtime for their livelihood. The planned work to combine Docker core technology with the standalone Docker distributed workload manager (Swarm) will cause much hand-wringing for parts of the container ecosystem as others try to determine whether they can continue to live with a dependency on Docker at their core.

Some will drop out and some will be purchased by larger companies not wishing to be left behind. This will leave a sparser battlefield for the remaining container management platforms. After several perplexing rounds of attempts to differentiate themselves, the ones that will survive are those that can demonstrate a clear ability to orchestrate blended and complex workloads in a fashion that an enterprise can manage with trust.

- Neeraj Gupta, SVP of Product and Engineering

Rise of Data Fabric, Fall of VMs

2016 will see the beginning of the death for custom and specialty hardware and the rise of containers as they take significant market share from VMs. Configuring hardware for VMs (and vice versa) is an outdated practice that is too costly and inefficient for today's standards. The public cloud (commodity hardware) will win and drive mass adoption of containers and unikernels-creating a data fabric that can instantly run any application or workload. Ultimately, it won't matter what's "under the hood" as long as it works with speed, security and scale.

- Josh Ellithorpe, Software Architect

##

Derek Collison, Founder and CEO: An industry veteran and pioneer in large-scale distributed systems and enterprise computing, Derek Collison has held executive positions at TIBCO Software, Google, and VMware. At TIBCO, he designed and implemented a wide range of messaging products, including Rendezvous and EMS.

Neeraj Gupta, SVP of Product and Engineering: Neeraj is a long-time technologist and leads engineering at Apcera. Before joining Apcera as VP of Engineering, Neeraj was SVP of Product and Engineering at Appcelerator, an enterprise mobile and cloud platform company.