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

Contributed by Michael Morton, CTO, Dell Boomi

Four Technology Trends to Watch in 2016

The advent of Internet toll roads

The days of wireless carriers offering unlimited data plans for consumers are a distant memory, and more change is in the wind. In much the same way wireless carriers charge consumers for data use, telecommunications companies will soon be charging businesses for streaming data over the Internet. Internet "net neutrality" will fail, and the new data plan model will require businesses to think carefully if all the data they are sending is necessary. It will also require developers to re-architect applications to minimize the amount of data that flows over the Internet, and perhaps build in the ability to monitor data utilization to help prevent businesses from exceeding their data tier. While companies might have to rethink their data flow over the Internet, this will not impact the move to the cloud. Companies will not risk moving back on premises because from an operational expense standpoint, it will still be cheaper to use the Internet than buy a new 32 core, 64 RAM server and pay someone to keep it up and running 24x7. Cloud services will still be monetarily advantageous.

Voice, hand, and body gestures for activating commands will gain traction

Technology is catching up to science fiction, and voice, hand, and body gestures will soon be usable interfaces for many real-time situations. There's plenty of computational power to do intelligence and plenty of network bandwidth to process the data that is involved in intelligent questions and intelligent responses. For example, if you want to see all the pending sales of a product over a period greater than 60 days, you'd typically open a spreadsheet, log into a tool or perhaps log onto a mobile phone. But why do you need to touch anything? Why not just put a phone to your ear, ask your question and get the answer? While that's achievable today on a very basic level, you can expect to see much more going forward. If sales depends on the weather, you'll ask about sales engagements in the northeast region and the probability that inventory needs to be moved because of the weather. Eventually, no one will tolerate using a statistical integration tool or writing an integration process to obtain an answer for a question such as this. When we move to voice, hand and body gestures, it will be up to the underlying software system to do the integration necessary to obtain the answer that can be delivered in a more progressive way.

2016 is the Year of Intelligence

Intelligence is going to have the buzz this year. Having access to all this data - business data, IoT data, my car data, every-move-I-make data - it's going to be a correlation of all the data sources, and it's going to produce higher forms of intelligence. With fast computational horsepower, and gigabit networks becoming more common, the technology is no longer holding us back. You'll see next generation integration tooling and platforms that help customers perform integrations easier - the citizen integrator movement helping a non-IT person build integrations faster based on intelligent services.  Furthermore, we will be interacting with something to solve a problem in a more intelligent manner - maybe voice or hand or body gestures. The overarching theme for 2016 will be intelligence.

APIs will change focus

The API Economy, which today is predominantly based on companies monetizing their catalog of well-defined APIs for developers, will evolve to more of an Intelligent Services Economy. APIs as we know it today will still exist, but they will only be used as data feeds to intelligent services which will require data from many sources to produce intelligent results.

For example, in order for retailers to be more competitive, they will need to shift to using services from intelligent services providers. Take the case of someone shopping online for car tires. The online retailer should be able to dynamically identify the year, make and model of car owned by the shopper, as well as be able to incorporate information about the seasonal weather of where the shopper resides and hence does most of the driving, while also knowing their style of driving. Dare we say also know the income level of the shopper as well? All of this information will be used to be able to intelligently suggest the best tire buying options. Geographical, weather, and automobile data is already easily available today. This is just a simple example for illustrative purposes. The real power and shift to an intelligent services economy will be for more complex scenarios involving much more data about the consumer - based on the data produced by the devices they use (cars, ATMs, fitness trackers, GPS, garage doors, alarm systems, etc), websites they visit, purchases they've made, their level of health insurance, and even their actions in society (who were they near and for how long), etc.

The aggregation of all this consumer information, while still delivered through APIs, diminishes the value of the APIs themselves. The value is really in the intelligence that the aggregate of the consumer information provides, by making the customer experience more tailored, easy, and pleasurable.

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About the Author

Michael Morton is the CTO of Dell Boomi, where he is responsible for product innovation.