Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Data Reaches Every Corner of the Globe

By David Flynn, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Hammerspace

2022 will be the year that data reaches every corner of the globe.  In the world of computer hardware design, 2022 will signal shift from commodity toward higher efficiency, special purpose design.  This trend will change the face of the industry and favor logic design engineers.  The most successful innovation companies will possess the talent not just to operate in scripting languages but to expand their talent to design hardware logic and optimize at a lower level within the hardware. 

1.      ARM will be taking over x86 in the datacenter

Businesses who are able to harness the most compute power, fastest, will have a competitive advantage. 

Through 2022, ARM will no longer be a datacenter toy but will instead be a mainstay.  will quickly be quickly taking over x86 in the datacenter, enabling the most successful innovation organizations to harness new technology to leverage increased total core count, increased total processing power, and a reducing in processing power/watt. 

In the cloud, ARM-based options will deliver a substantial savings on compute power compared with the X86-based options.

2.      Custom designed chips will be increasingly common

Innovators can no longer depend upon Moore's Law to continue to accelerate compute performance at the same exponential pace that has been enjoyed in the past.   No longer will it be possible to win the innovation battle with generic software depending on commodity hardware to run it as the speed needed. 

As Moore's Law slows down, big tech companies began designing their own chips for intelligence in products such as autonomous vehicles and cell phones.  

3.      Software engineering talent will be in short supply

The trend toward more efficient hardware design will require increasingly high-performance software locally where IT equipment is pooled in clouds or grouped in data centers.

4.      Data will need to be a globally accessible resource

Work from home will frequently be defined not just as work from your house near the office, but to, work from your home country.  Data will need to be a globally accessible resource to the workforce while remaining high-performance locally to take advantage of the high-efficiency, special purpose hardware. 

5.      Edge will no longer be just for data capture, it will be for data use

Everything is now interconnected with the Internet of Things (IOT).  Customers and workforce are now distributed around the world, and, soon most people will have broadband internet through SpaceX Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper Project. 

6.      Technology will solve problems previously considered the domain of governments

The adoption of cryptocurrency and bit coin will be seen in more countries, enabling the people and technology to address problems on a local basis.  

7.      Innovators will more rapidly embrace patent open source. 

The most successful innovation organizations will accelerate pace of development through technology sharing in the open source community.  By attracting large-scale participation and promoting a technology solution to peers, organizations embracing patent open source will see faster development and accelerated adoption.

There will be a reduced dependance on filing and litigating patents on all components of innovation as organizations master the art of accomplishing both speed of development and IP protection.  Monetization of the engineering talent will come through advanced new products being sold, not through protection of a patent portfolio.

The most notable innovators will be focused on attracting the best engineering talent who can take advantage of the rapid innovation in open source and build new solutions advancing and leveraging it.  There will be a continued gravity pulling the best engineering talent into a small number of organizations who are delivering new concepts to the market. 

Examples: Tesla and then Toyota outsourcing self-driving software, Linux, and, Cloud Native Compute Foundation

The combination of advancing technology to connect all corners of the world with data, the move of the workforce to home countries, and the availability of decentralized digital currency will make 2022 a monumental and game changing year.

And, I'm not saying that protecting innovative ideas with patents is bad, or the time ill spent.  Patents are to help others learn how to do things later.  But, I am saying that yet more important is to focus on the rate of innovation and time to market with those innovations. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hammerspace co-founder and Chief Executive Officer David Flynn is a recognized leader in IT innovation who has been architecting disruptive computing platforms since his early work in supercomputing and Linux systems. David holds more than 100 patents in areas across web browser technologies, mobile device management, network switching and protocols to distributed storage systems. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science at Brigham Young University and serves on boards for several organizations and startup companies.