
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Subbiah Sundaram, VP Products, HYCU, Inc.
What We're Excited About in 2019 - A Year Coming
It's that time of year again.
Time to dust off the crystal ball, turn over the tea leaves and take a look at
what 2019 has in store for IT companies. We were pretty proud of a few of our
2018 predictions, and know that many of them will continue to generate
significant interest well into 2019 and beyond.
For
now though, let's take a look at what has our customers, and many technology
users excited about this year.
- It's a
Wild, Wild Multi-cloud World Out There:Clouds have been in existence for many years
now. So, people think about why all this buzz. From an infrastructure
perspective, pretty much 90% of the customers have some cloud usage going on in
their infrastructure today. What we are starting to observe in our customers is
that many of them are mature and their usage has gotten to the point where they
are talking about multi-vendor strategy for their clouds. This in our opinion
is a turning point in adoption of cloud. If not for anything, just to keep the
cloud vendors compete for the business, customers will need solutions that work
across multiple clouds. We will see most of the vendors who have "marketed"
their solutions as "multi-cloud" finally will be force to either deliver or
shrink in 2019
- Continued
Consolidation around Platforms and Eliminating Unnecessary Silos: It is no surprise that companies are looking
to simplify their IT investments and take advantage of advances in reducing
complexity. When you look at the next generation platforms in the industry
today, the ones that come to mind are AWS, Azure and GCP in the Public Cloud
space and Nutanix in the Enterprise Cloud space. While VMware is a great
technology, their platform play seems to be around AWS. We would consider a
solution a platform when it can handle all of the enterprise workloads. In the
enterprise what we are seeing is that customers trying to consolidate on the
platforms they choose and are eliminating the siloed infrastructure for
secondary storage workloads. In 2019, we expect this trend to accelerate
significantly.
- Using the
Cloud for Burst Workloads and Adoption of as-a- Service Infrastructure Offerings: Infrastructure as a Service has been in use
for many years now. For most people in the infrastructure space, they think in
terms of instantly provisioning VMs, Storage and Networking as IaaS. While that
is good, the bigger value will be realized when customers use higher level
offerings like Database as a Service, Backup and Recovery as a Service, Data
Warehouse as a Service, and Streaming Big Data Services. When utilized
effectively, these would lead to tremendous savings and agility for the
business. In 2019, we see customers not just doing a lift and shift to the
cloud, but truly using the cloud for burst workloads and also utilizing these
higher level services.
- Artificial
Intelligence Moving into the Mainstream in Infrastructure Management: AI is all the buzz and every vendor and
every solution seems to have some AI explainer attached to it. But, if you look
at reality, very few of the solutions are truly AI enabled. Many of them take
their existing solution and take a classic rules-based engine and call it AI.
Well that will change in 2019. Finally, we are beginning to see companies
putting two things in place:
- True customer problems
they want to solve with AI, and
- A required dataset to
make sure the solution is meaningful.
In
2019, you will not just see a lot of buzz around AI, but the true value AI
brings in solving customer problems that normal humans would have a hard time
finding out about due to the sheer size of the data to digest and the
associated complexity that comes with.
- Hybrid
Cloud is Here, for True Workloads: When vendors and customers had to support both applications on
prem and cloud, they immediately called it "Hybrid Cloud". But in reality the
applications were in an either or situation and not a true Hybrid Cloud
application. With the innovation that AWS has done with Outposts, Azure with
Azure Stack and Nutanix with Xi, we are starting to see a truly hybrid
infrastructure emerge that can allow applications to be elastic and spread
across private and public clouds.
- Containers
Not a Passing Fad, But Becoming More Mainstream: Docker made Containers popular. When you
talk with most customers and ask them about Containers, they say that they are
playing with them, but the true actual production cases are very limited. We
are finally going to see broader adoption in 2019. Main reasons being:
- Management of
Containers has become easier
- Container Management
has been integrated into the various platforms like AWS, Google, Azure and
Nutanix.
- Customers are not just
looking at lift and shift to the cloud, but also are looking at rethinking
their next-generation applications.
Any that you think we
missed? Let us know, and feel free to leave a comment!
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About the Author
Subbiah
Sundaram, VP Products, HYCU, Inc.
Subbiah joined
HYCU in January 2017 and has been instrumental in enabling the company to
deliver the best in class multi-cloud solutions for Nutanix and Google Cloud.
Prior to joining HYCU, Subbiah held senior executive positions at BMC, CA,
DataGravity, EMC, NetApp and Veritas and has extensive experience in product
development, planning and strategy. He holds a MS in Computer Engineering from
the University of Iowa and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern University.