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

Contributed by - Ken Tsai, GVP, Head of Database and Data Management Product Marketing, SAP

Five Predictions for a Data-Rich 2018

Part of making forward-looking predictions is seeing the major influencers of the past. In 2017, companies edged forward with their digital transformation strategies and began exploring compelling technologies like machine learning, predictive analytics, and IoT. What they realized is that data is integral to their future. In 2018, data-business, operational, customer, location, sensor, and more-will be at the forefront of companies' business strategies, and we will see data and data technology platforms have an impact in unexpected ways.

Here are four trends to watch in 2018:

Data platforms will have a bigger role in helping address compliancy-starting with GDPR.

As of May 2018, The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be applicable in EU and European Economic Area member states. GDPR does not introduce substantially new concepts, but it does increase compliance requirements.

Organizations found in breach of the regulation can expect fines of up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million - whichever is greater. As regulations like these put pressure on businesses to ensure data privacy, database platform technologies must rise to the occasion.

For SAP HANA, we are adding new anonymization methods so that organizations can both protect privacy and analyze data simultaneously. GDPR is one example of where anonymization is needed, and we will see more in 2018 and beyond. We can expect an ever-increasing number of data-centric analytic use cases around compliance, and we will see data anonymization go beyond existing security functionality like masking. Watch for technologies that allow companies to:

• Turn the data privacy challenge into an opportunity by exploring new data-centric value-adding scenarios, for example data-as-a-service, without risking compliance
• Maximize the value of their data by using state-of-the-art anonymization technology to leverage sensitive or personal data (e.g. medical records) in use cases where this data could not previously be used due to rules and regulations
• Demonstrate digital responsibility by showing customers and users that they care about protecting their sensitive and confidential data.

Database solutions that process transactions and analyze data on a single platform will become more prevalent and a requirement for digital businesses.

In the past year, one quickly emerging space in database platforms is so new that analysts are using different terms to describe it. In this case, the capability is having a single operational database for data management and operational data management that can combine transactional and analytics workloads. If you've seen references to Hybrid Transaction/Analytical Processing (HTAP), translytical databases or analytics transaction processing, they are all referring to basically the same thing. These capabilities will be critical across multiple industries as enterprise architecture professionals add platforms into their environments that deliver real-time insights to the business.

Watch for this new category to become a standard requirement for businesses. They will be found in stock trading, fraud detection, counterterrorism, patient health monitoring, machine analysis, earthquake monitoring, and more.

Businesses are ready for next-generation advance location intelligence.

Location data has made life considerably easier for consumers, and in 2018 businesses will start taking advantage of geospatial data and combining it with business data. Geospatial analysis brings together GIS, the system of record for maps, and ERP, the system of record for business data.

We can expect to see game-changing innovations, as the insights from geospatial analysis can impact enterprise asset management, risk management, new customer prospecting and creating new business models. Sectors that will be among the first to embrace geospatial analysis will be disaster management, predictive modeling in property and casualty insurance, agriculture, and smart city management.

SAP will continue to work with Esri ArcGIS, a geographic information system to open up this data for developers who want to combine their business data with geographic data.  The City of Cape Town, South Africa, for example, put the technology to work to improve its emergency management and has integrated six emergency and policing services onto one common platform to improve collaboration and coordination across the agencies.

Database-as-a-Service will become more widespread as companies move Data Management to the cloud.

While still at the early stages of adoption at 5% of the overall database market in 2016, industry experts and analysts project DBaaS to grow at 36% CAGR to represent at least 14% of the overall DBMS market by 2020. The trend also reflects the steady shift of enterprise workloads from simple test and development, to much more sophisticated and mission critical applications. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) will continue to expand beyond multi-cloud support into on-premise private clouds, to enable new types of value-added data processing scenarios that previously weren't available. This database platform as a service (DBpaaS) model will follow a utility-driven, serverless architecture in the cloud. Siloed, purpose built databases and data management capabilities will need to converge even within the cloud environment, as it remains rather complex today. There are business application and process scenarios that will be much better served when the data we need to access is already separated between on-premise and cloud.

Data integration and transformation tools will also get a new facelift, as enterprises are looking for solutions beyond ETL and data wrangling to create a logically centralized data governance and data pipelining management capabilities across diverse data system landscape. As a result, I see the rise of Enterprise Data Operations - DataOps - to become a more critical discipline for database analysts, data engineers, data analysts and scientists to understand. For now, organizations are still developing their DBaaS strategy, but by year end we will see a steady transition to public and private cloud where they will be deploying integrated HTAP and OLTP use cases.

More Blockchain Use Cases to Come

Aside from crypto currency, blockchain continues to be a hot topic that doesn't have a unique use case. I anticipate that in 2018 we will start seeing more blockchain innovation outside of crypto-currency. There will be more integrated blockchain and DBMS platform solutions, which will open up brand new opportunities and customer use case scenarios surrounding IoT, AI and ML. 

I'm excited about what 2018 holds for the companies that develop database platform technologies and those that use them and push us to push the technologies to do more, to do it faster, and more cost effectively. We're listening and responding so that 2018 can be the best year possible in the database and data management space.

##

About the Author

Ken has 20 years of experiences in the IT industry, responsible for application development, services, pre-sales, business development and marketing. Ken is a graduate University of California, Berkeley.