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

Dynamic data, supply chain issues continue with the cloud, shrink ideation to production cycle

By Lenley Hensarling, Chief Strategy Officer, Aerospike

As Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “There is nothing permanent except change.” A big change in 2022 will be-change. We expect opportunities and challenges in the year ahead, but the silver lining is that we have no doubt that businesses are ready to tackle all of it. With data more valuable than ever, and companies more attuned to goals and needs than ever, especially after unpredictability forced adaptability, here are a few predictions we anticipate over the next year.  

Data will become even more dynamic

Data will change faster and more frequently than ever before. It will no longer be acceptable to analyze massive amounts of static data once per month, once per week, or even once per day. Organizations will need to glean insights from streaming data in real time to find new patterns and discover and act on them. Navigating data is like running whitewater, where you need to adapt instantly to a changing environment. Those that learn to run the rapids will succeed.

Supply chain issues, both hardware and personnel, will continue with the cloud

Supply chain issues throughout the global economy, driven by Covid, have been well documented. And the cloud is no exception. As companies continue to migrate to the cloud in 2022, they’ll be surprised to find hardware and personnel shortages that may force them to alter their plans. Some organizations may have trouble getting the number of cloud instances they’ll need. They’ll also struggle finding staff to manage their cloud operations with so much turnover happening in the workforce. These restrictions will lead to more organizations seeking out fully managed service cloud offerings.

Companies will look to shrink the ideation to production cycle

Next year, many organizations will start to look for new ways to drive revenue growth again after spending the past year getting back on track from the pandemic. One avenue they’ll begin to explore is taking advantage of business opportunities that are happening in the moment and are somewhat transient. Like many of today’s digital businesses that operate successfully in this new economy, established companies need to be able to move fast and shrink their ideation to production cycles. Exercising the elastic scalability of the cloud can help companies tailor the consumption of compute, network, and storage resources to the pace of their business. And it’ll provide the agility needed to identify a need or demand and quickly pivot to seize new opportunities.

We also expect these trends to apply to verticals like Ad Tech and Telecom. With more data available than ever, and with more demand for real-time transactions than ever, Ad Tech and Telecom are at the heart of this. Ad Tech is experiencing a renaissance, having gathered a significant amount of investment, innovation, and attention with platforms rapidly seeking to serve ads to targeted audiences at petabyte scale. Likewise, with massive amounts of data streaming in from mobile, 5G, and IoT sensor applications, telecom companies need to rapidly ingest data and then process it at petabyte scale with virtually no latency. Data demand will only increase, and these verticals will need to continue to scale to support it.

Though Ad Tech and telecom are both well poised for growth, they are not immune to supply chain disruption and the day-to-day challenges that industries must face, independent of the value of a product, especially since we’ve learned that the only constant is change. 

Nonetheless, we look forward to both the opportunities and the challenges of 2022 and how industries will leverage data to grow, and we will be ready to support them every step of the way. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lenley Hensarling is the Chief Strategy Officer of Aerospike. Lenley has more than 30 years of experience in engineering management, product management, and operational management at both startups and large successful software companies. Lenley previously held executive positions at Novell, Enterworks, JD Edwards, EnterpriseDB, and Oracle. He has extensive experience in delivering value to customers and shareholders in both enterprise applications and infrastructure software. Lenley believes that business is now happening in real-time and that the right infrastructure for serving data to new real-time applications is a rapidly accelerating requirement for businesses to succeed.