Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Peter Eicher is Director of Marketing at Catalogic Software

2019: No More Stuff, Fear Rises and More

When VMblog contacted me about writing a predictions blog, I started down the usual road that vendor marketing people walk down. You know, the one that predicts all trends will somehow converge on my products! Amazing how that works. But even though I've been guilty of that myself, this year I wanted to take off the marketing glasses and get a wider view.

#1: The End of Stuff

For a long time, technology trends were about the latest STUFF. Going back some years, you had the introduction of hypervisors, which started getting deployed on servers. There were Virtual Tape Libraries which morphed into Purpose Built Backup Appliances. Everybody ran out and bought one. Later you had hyperconverged storage and all-flash storage. They sell billions of dollars of that now. Lots of cool stuff. You can touch it. It's right there in the data center humming and using electricity.

But now, all the trends seem to be things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, software analytics and so on. Sure, ultimately it all runs on a server and storage somewhere, but it's not STUFF anymore that seems to be moving the technology needle. It's all software, all the time. What's the next hardware revolution? Where's the cool new STUFF?  

#2: Things Get Scarier

Certainly, data security is a trend that never goes away. It just changes form. Yesterday's spam email trying to sell you fake Viagra is now a super-sophisticated piece of malware that locks up your computer.  And just the other day I read about "vaporworms" or fileless malware. Yup, it's an infection that wiggles from one computer to another but never actually drops a piece of code. So what do you detect?  It's got to be based on system behavior, which is a lot harder to detect, especially before it even does anything. How do you stop behavior that hasn't happened yet? I don't know what's going to happen in 2019 in terms of data security, but I can assure you it will get scarier.

#3: Amazon Everywhere

The giant nation-state of Amazon Inc. will continue to encroach on new areas, like when they bought Whole Foods. What's next? More brick-and-mortar expansion for sure. More advanced home gizmos that I will never buy in a million years. ("Alexa, mind your own business.") Maybe Amazon will buy an internet jobs site, since as far as I can tell they don't own one yet, and labor arbitrage seems like a perfect area for their take-no-prisoners business model. Imagine Amazon controlling 45% or so of the labor recruitment market. Or rather, don't imagine that.   

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm mostly annoyed that Amazon's new New York headquarters is probably going to mess with my view. And THAT I cannot forgive! 

#4: The Other Hypervisors Gain Ground

Since I should say something about virtualization... VMware and Hyper-V will remain the one-two punch of hypervisors, of course. But I do think we're going to see increased momentum for all the other hypervisors: RedHat Virtualization, Xen, KVM, Oracle VM, and so on. They keep advancing in terms of features, and IT departments are going to realize that they can migrate a lot of compute off VMware and/or Hyper-V and save a bundle on licensing. Most critical production systems will remain on the Big Two, but there's plenty of opportunity to migrate Tier 2 and 3 workloads to much cheaper hypervisor platforms.

#5: Self-driving Cars Keep Moving Ahead

Yes, they will. And I'm still not getting into one.  

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About the Author

Peter Eicher is Director of Marketing at Catalogic Software. He has worked in multiple facets of enterprise software for over 20 years, including data protection, security and network management. All opinions are his own.