Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Sarah Lahav, CEO of SysAid Technologies
Corporate Tech Change in 2016: Developer Power, Cloud Disruption, the IoT, and Security
Predicting the future is easy. However being right with your predictions is much less so. Thankfully 2016 is not that far into the future and most of my predictions have already started to emerge in 2015, via early adopters, and will continue to be seen in the mainstream during 2016.
In my opinion, technology in 2016 will be characterized by power shifts. As corporate IT, and the technology it employs, transforms at an exponential rate. The impact of these power shifts will affect customer budgets and priorities, which will in turn change technology vendor approaches.
Corporate technology and those who provide it will be viewed and treated differently. Developers will come to the fore as invaluable and potentially hard to acquire human resource. Business units will source more of their commodity IT directly, with cloud not only supporting this but also changing traditional vendor business models and behaviors.
So what do I think we will see in 2016?
1. Technology Vendors Lose The Balance of IT Power
Large organizations will not only continue to adopt cloud, they will also rip up their IT approach to lean towards line-of-business IT procurement and consumption. They will eliminate central IT-driven procurement contracts – which are often seen as out of touch, and wasteful and limiting – and move IT vendors to consumption-based agreements with no upfront costs, no lock-in, no minimum use, and pay-as-you-go billing. Many vendors are already responding. Microsoft, for example, is modifying its Enterprise Agreement program to be consumption-focused, such that customer dollars are targeted at the consumption of Office 365 and cloud units instead of CPUs or other old-fashioned licensing constructs. The vendors that resist the need to change to these new customer requirements, such as SAP did with Royal Phillips, will lose their direct relationship with the customer – as the customer inserts a service provider as a gateway, or middleman, between them.
2. Developers Rise from the Basement to the Boardroom
During 2016, the perception that developers are basement-dwelling, socially-awkward techies with no grasp on business reality will continue to be shattered. As companies change their core competency from “shifting atoms” to using software to delight customers, developers will become distributed across lines of business and into the C-suite as they create business processes in software in real time. As a result, companies will need to publicly change their image, as well as changing their internal thinking, to adopt approaches such as Open Source to attract the best developer talent.
3. Lines of Business are Sold Technology Directly
Technology changes are upping the stakes for Shadow IT and lines of business are increasingly eschewing central IT functions and going straight to the technology vendors themselves, especially cloud vendors. Key to this is the line-of-business departments not needing deep, traditional IT skills; with modern Shadow IT purchases mostly of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) variety. With CRM and customer support, IT service management (ITSM) and IT service desk, and marketing applications all great examples of this. Oracle in particular has seen and responded to this opportunity. Understanding that there is a gap between the huge enterprise IT market and the current cloud leaders, AWS and Azure, who are still mostly focused on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). But who knows where AWS and Azure will head in 2016?
4. PaaS Frameworks Reduce the Waste of “Samework”
2015 finally saw the rise of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) after years of promise. CloudFoundry became a foundation consisting of customers and vendors; new alliances emerged with RedHat’s OpenShift now playing nice on Azure; and Pivotal continued to shout the loudest from the highest hilltop. Netflix open-sourced much of their operationally-minded PaaS components, with these now included in CloudFoundry, such that modern PaaS offerings are very complete. These “opinionated PaaS” frameworks can help organizations to “get there faster” by not needing to reinvent things such as log-in mechanisms, monitoring systems, or identity and access management systems. The more “opinionated” a platform is, the less needs to be built for the platform to be functional and operational. In my opinion, any corporate IT developers not using an opinionated PaaS in 2016 should be questioned as to why they are reinventing the wheel.
5. IoT Drives Exponential Growth of Data and Connectivity
There are already a number of excellent business IoT use cases and these will explode, across a variety of industries, where significant investment has been earmarked. These industries include healthcare, aviation, home automation, and civil infrastructure among others. As IoT sensors become smaller and cheaper, and thus more ubiquitous, they will both require more wireless connectivity and will generate huge amounts of time-series data. Such data has unique properties – such as large occurrences of small, unchanging sensor-data writes and variable-frequency big-data reads on the same data. Combined, these two factors will drive more cloud usage and new database systems such as Basho’s Riak TS.
6. The Need for Malware Combat and Breach Reduction
Sadly, more than 90 percent of corporate security breaches are caused by employees being hijacked by malware or suckered by phishing to reveal their credentials to criminals. In 2016, multiple factors of access security will become the norm to replace the username and passwords we are all so familiar with. A good example is authentication code generators on mobile phones. Or that new security software will interpret email attachments and applications embedded in browsers, such as PDF browsers, to decompose the content, check it against known safe formats (using whitelists), and recompose correctly before passing it on to the end user.
So that’s six corporate technology predictions from me, what do you expect to see in 2016?
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About the Author
As the company’s first employee, Sarah Lahav has remained the vital link between SysAid Technologies and its customers since 2003. She is the current CEO and former VP of Customer Relations at SysAid – two positions that have fueled her passion in customer service.
