
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Aaron Jacobson, Principal, NEA
The Year for Acceleration
The
Private IPO Party is Over:
More companies will IPO at valuations equal or
below that of their last round. Public institutional investors, once
eager to get in before the IPO, will increasingly pass on late-stage deals and
wait for the public offering. Except for a select group of high
fliers, late-stage companies will be forced to accelerate their IPO plans or if
unready to go public, cut difficult deals with private equity investors.
Data
Breach Bonanza:
If you thought 2015 was tough with major data
breaches at CVS, Anthem, the IRS, and the OPM, batten down the hatches for
2016. Enterprises continue to rely on the citadel approach to security
(protect the corporate network by laying defenses at the edge) yet the shift to
cloud and mobile have long since broken down the perimeters of corporate IT. Expect more major breaches at the Fortune 500 and Government agencies as
these organizations are slow to adopt technologies built for perimeterless
world.
Containers
Cross the Chasm:
In 2016, both CoreOS and Docker will be in fierce
competition to land customers for their recently released enterprise-class
orchestration tools, which enable containerized applications to run in
production. Look for major announcements by both of leading Fortune 500
companies committed to "containerizing" their infrastructure.
Spark
Ignites A Fire In Big Data:
Spark, which is able to perform big data
calculations 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce, saw tremendous growth in 2015
and has become the most active Apache open source Big Data project. 2016
will see Spark grow beyond the Hadoop community as it cements itself as a data
processing platform used not just by data engineers, but any application or
analyst that touches data.
Facebook goes to Facework:
Next
year will see the launch of a serious effort by Facebook to penetrate the
enterprise with "Facebook at Work". LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Slack watch
out!
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About
the Author
Aaron Jacobson is Principal at NEA,
and is focused on information and energy technology investments.