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

Contributed by Sean Suchter, CEO and Co-founder, Pepperdata

Big data insights don't require heavy lifting in 2016

Every small business will have a data scientist behind it

The appetite for data insights has already scaled. BI and analytics are moving from backroom IT departments to front facing line of business users, but the shift has been primarily in enterprises that have invested both capital and staffing resources to make this happen. By 2020, businesses of all size will have the power of big data insights. This will be made possible by the rise of machine learning and AI.

Machine learning will take the complexity out of big data analytics. As machines embedded with sensors monitor and engage with data in real-time those insights will be easily generated into actionable tasks.

High value, big data verticalized apps will be downloadable for the enterprise

Consumers already have apps that help them move through their day - delivering instantaneous data to keep them plugged into the world. We've grown accustomed to downloading apps to improve our productivity, manage our travel, and account for our expenses. From sun up to sun down, access to real-time data and insights has transformed the way we work and how we interact with one another.

The notion of apps will soon transcend the enterprise as well, as businesses are now seeing trends emerge that present opportunities for verticalized solutions. As we've seen in consumer offerings, soon healthcare, finance, telecom, and manufacturing, which all need to move business at the speed of thought-will shift from developing custom applications to downloading apps that can be accessed from any IoT device.

This will significantly decrease the heavy lifting of application development, which today is still challenging and complex, even with a robust open source ecosystem of tools.

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About the Author

Sean Suchter, CEO and Co-founder of Pepperdata.  

Sean Suchter was the founding GM of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, where he led the integration of Facebook and Twitter content into Bing search. Prior to Microsoft, Sean managed the Yahoo Search Technology team, the first production user of Hadoop. Sean joined Yahoo through the acquisition of Inktomi, and holds a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.