Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Jeanne Morain, Author and Digital Transformation Strategist at iSpeak Cloud

Transformation Stall, Pivot, and Planning

Pivoting Plans for the Perfect Hybrid Storm

Companies are in the eye of the perfect cloud storm.  Several pressures are weighing heavy and inciting the need for major pivotal change in plans, design, and evolution to move forward on current digital transformation efforts.  Although some companies have found pockets of success in a transformation project or two large-scale transformation efforts are still stalling. This is due to lack of visibility and control for costs, compliance, and agility.  Many leaders have been hit with "Oh Sugar Honey IT" moments realizing underlying plans may lack visibility for hidden costs around compliance, licensing, data, and infrastructure for their "cloud only" or "cloud first" move.  This has caused them to take pause and rethink their strategy of either negotiating it all back to the providers or moving back in house.

First, visibility and control will be a top initiative from both the vendor and customer side.  Vendors, Agencies, and Enterprises will continue to invest in solutions like artificial intelligence and big data that enable software defined data center and traditional software workload migration.  The "Cloud Service Platform or CSP" will manifest as the management fabric needed for hybrid solutions.  Vendors will push for their data and/or management platform to be the solution of choice.  Customers will discover that in this nascent area no one vendor actually has all the data needed to create the CSP for Hybrid Cloud.  Furthermore, they will realize that many are still taking the legacy infrastructure approach but calling it cloud.  Innovation will drive a new way of thinking about the new Cloud World View - not from the vendors but Agency and Enterprise Leaders. This will force many customers to build out custom solutions or cobble together innovative ones with legacy approaches as a band aide.

Secondly, licensing and data as a service will be front and center in 2018 to address compliance and financial risks.  The 4000 US Federal government and US companies are quickly learning that unlike past regulations like Sarbanes Oxley or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that were US based - the Global Data Protection Ruling due in 2018 will have teeth.  The regulators in the European Union are already intervening with disputes between Microsoft and an Irish Data Center.  This will be the tip of the iceberg once the law comes to pass.  This combined with multi-million dollar lawsuits from SAP, Oracle and others will heighten focus on fixing the hybrid service visibility issue around license and data compliance.  This area will heat up from not only a vendor and audit perspective but also priority for the C-Level both in the public and private sectors. 

Finally, even the most thought out initiative can be stalled or derailed due to other initiatives competing for resources across the business and technology teams.  The current DevOps initiatives will morph into BusDevOps with expanded teams, better tie into key performance indicators, and accountability to rectify/reduce overstating benefits and understating costs.  More focus will be on people and process streamlining and automation that are essential to scale to meet the demands of Omni-channel consumers.  New "Digital" titles will continue to emerge on both the business and technology side as companies try to consolidate initiatives, reduce risks, and costs.

Preparing for the Rise of the Millennial 

As more millennial talent starts to move up the ranks into management and other positions companies will seek innovative ways to retain, attract, and educate this new workforce.  They will start to employ new terminology and methods that appeal to their gamer inclinations.  In addition, companies will have to learn and figure out the best way to deal with the bad habits to improve accountability of this workforce.  One that has coined the term "ghosting" not only for dealing with unwanted suitors but also unwanted tasks at work. Ghosting is defined as when an employee simply disappears without a word or response.  This has been more commonplace not only for positions but also for projects or assignments.  They may show up to the meetings but actually not do the work for weeks or months if it does not excite them.  Like every generation before, employers will have extremes of type A performers and their counterparts.  The reward system, salary structure and work environment will have to adapt to award accountability via performance not only with key initiatives but mundane tasks.  Leaders that embrace millennial talent and learn to speak their language will soar, the opposite also holds true for those that don't. 

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About the Author 

Jeanne Morain has held various executive roles in strategy and product management with the Apollo Group, Flexera Software, VMware (Thinstall) and BMC Software (Marimba). Jeanne currently advises startups and large enterprises on implementing new products and strategies to enable excellence in the digital economy. Jeanne has two decades of experience in systems management, virtualization and cloud computing and has participated in the implementation of solutions for millions of users across Fortune 2000 companies. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the prestigious International Association of IT Asset Manager's Fellow Recipient in 2016 for her work in business service management, Lifetime Member Award in the areas of business service management, universal clients (also known as virtual desktop infrastructure), dynamic data center and virtualization. She is an author and coauthor of books on BSM, virtualization and cloud computing.

Jeanne is best known for her customer-/partner-centric approach. She is a noted speaker at OReilly Velocity, VMworld, Interop, CloudSlam, IAITAM, CXO events and other industry conferences. Jeanne holds a Master's degree from Southern Illinois University and certification in ITIL. www.ispeakcloud.com, twitter @JeanneMorain