Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Patrick Hubbard, Head Geek, SolarWinds
An Amalgamation of Old and New Tech Will Build a Stronger IT Network
Ongoing digital transformation is an evergreen
tactic organizations will continue to use to ensure they remain competitive in
a constantly shifting IT landscape. And like most trends, there are some tried-and-true
strategies while others have faded out to make way for something newer and
better. In 2020, we'll see a stronger emphasis on application performance
management-particularly, tools available for decades but often underused and
underappreciated. We'll also see organizations adopt new strategies to adapt to
new services like 5G. But exactly how will enterprises approach this?
Enterprises
Take a Page From the Smart City Playbook
When
it comes to digital transformation, there are parallels between what smart
cities and enterprises are doing. Smart cities and innovative enterprises alike
are using technology as an agent of change. As demand for digital experiences
grows in 2020, enterprises will start to realize there's more to learn from
smart cities.
Smart
cities use technology to deliver services more effectively and ultimately
provide a better living environment for citizens. The same can be said for
enterprises looking to untangle their customer's supply chain or make a
physical plant run more efficiently. But cities also face the same challenges
of complexity, aging custom applications, overdue infrastructure upgrades,
everything mature enterprises deal with, and more. However, some may argue
smart cities are transforming faster than businesses already, adopting smart
city mobility solutions citizens enjoy, and progressing private-public
partnerships to drive further innovation. Smart cities are learning things, and
finally making progress in areas enterprise businesses are keen to address. The
research, experimentation, data, and best practices coming out of smart city
efforts can be helpful as businesses chart a course for business transformation
and technology modernization.
2020: At
a 5G Crossroads
As chipmakers and
ISPs alike continue along the path to broad 5G adoption, 2020 will prove to be
a critical inflection point. While we'll see certain societal impacts (such as improved
application performance and the enablement of new technologies for IoT,
collaboration, etc.), we can expect ISP powerhouses like Time Warner to
radically shift their offerings while telcos like Verizon continue to invest in
5G equipment.
5G is coming, and
although it may seem like the next generation of wireless tech will bring
nothing but speed, responsiveness, and the reach needed to unlock the full
capabilities of emerging tech trends, in actuality it will introduce
unprecedented pain points-and those without a current solution.
In 2019, we saw
smartphone makers like Samsung and ZTE bring 5G handsets to market. However, users
have only been to scratch the surface of 5G's potential as telcos and
networking companies are still building the infrastructure to support broader
coverage of this next generation tech. Consumers running applications on a "5G
lite" network (like AT&T's 5Ge band) may experience faltering connectivity
switching between different speeds, resulting in degraded or unpredictable
performance for apps engineered to assume broadly available high performance
networks.
At the same time,
monitoring applications running on increasingly fragmented networks will become
even more important, pushing developers to optimize applications for all
connectivity speeds. Being able to measure network performance will also be key
to ensuring further 5G infrastructure rollouts are meeting latency
expectations.
Seeing
APM for the First Time in 30 Years
While application performance management (APM) tools have
been available since the 1990s, they're still among the most under-appreciated
tools in the technology industry. In 2020, this will change. As
companies continue to adopt hybrid cloud, they'll increasingly use dynamic
technologies to build new application features. While affording greater
flexibility, agility, and scalability day-to-day, these changes to how we
deliver applications make traditional monitoring techniques much more difficult
(sometimes impossible), while the business expects even greater performance.
We've reached an application
performance monitoring (APM) crossroads, and in 2020 we have a rare
chance to catch up with recent technology changes and regain control of
application delivery monitoring. We'll see the tech pro's focus expand from infrastructure
performance to real-world, end-user experiences.
For many engineers, this process will start with a simple
change in perspective: learning to think like an end user to monitor like a
wise admin. A renewed emphasis on implementing the tenets of APM offers
organizations a silver lining: it can buy the freedom to innovate. It's a way
to start more meaningful conversations with the CIO, where tech pros can begin
to educate business leaders about new ways to make customers happy.
As businesses continue to
prioritize customer-centricity and end-user experience in the year ahead (and
beyond) they'll use APM tools to evolve, innovate, and reach broader business
goals, ultimately resulting in increased implementation and corresponding skill
development.
##
About the Author
PATRICK HUBBARD, Head Geek
An accomplished technologist with over 20 years of
experience, Hubbard's career includes software development, operations, product
management and marketing, technology strategy, and advocacy. An unapologetic
market-hype deconstructionist, Hubbard is passionate about arming technology
professionals with the tools and skills to deliver services that delight, not
just satisfy, users. Hubbard's current focus is helping enterprises adopt
cloud-native and DevOps techniques that deliver the business transformation
CIOs increasingly demand.
Since joining SolarWinds in 2007, Hubbard has
combined his technical expertise with an IT customer perspective to drive product
strategy, launch the Head Geeks, develop and manage the SolarWinds
Certified Professional (SCP) and SolarWinds Academy
Training Classes programs, and create the SolarWinds online demo platform.
Today, most admins recognize Hubbard as the executive producer of the Telly
award-winning SolarWinds Lab, and SolarWinds THWACKcamp.