2018 analysts predictions round-up, plus, our own, with Rita Manachi (Ep. 89)

January 18, 2018 Michael Coté

At the end of the year there's no end of predictions from the IT analyst would. In this episode, Richard and I talk with Pivotal's head analyst relations, Rita Manachi. We cover predictions in software development, infrastructure and cloud, and handful of miscellaneous ones like AI. Just for funsies, each of us throws in a prediction as well, plus a bonus book recommendation to start the new year with.

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Prediction Highlights

Development

 

  • Both Forrester and Gartner believe AI will augment app dev esp. for manual/repetitive tasks and things like QA and testing.

  • Gartner on serverless: "By 2020, 90% of serverless deployments will occur outside the purview of I&O organizations when supporting general-use patterns."

  • What's the deal with high-code, low-code, and citizen developers?

Infrastructure

  • Gartner on containers in production: "By 2020, more than 50% of enterprises will run mission-critical, containerized cloud-native applications in production, up from less than 5% today." Read: less than 5% of apps in production now are containerized/cloud native.

  • Fintan Ryan on container stuff.

  • Forrester says kubernetes has won, from their 2018 cloud predictions PDF: "other options will remain and be useful, but industry mindshare and investment will favor Kubernetes because it: 1) builds on 15 years of running production container-based workloads at Google; 2) provides all necessary features today; 3) has the largest and fastest growing community (backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which counts all the five largest public cloud providers as active and contributing members); and 4) is an integral part of leading Iaas and PaaS offerings, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and OpenShift."

  • On the other hand, all the great thought lords and ladies keep moving up the stack.

  • Forrester is more bullish on private cloud than Gartner (who claims that most enterprises have failed in implementing TRUE private cloud b/c they do not employ the characteristics that Gartner believes = a cloud experience; Forrester also is more bullish on so-called Hybrid Cloud and believe Azure Stack set the standard for that.

  • That Chad Sakac piece on "get a real private cloud."

  • Glanced at the IT Operations Predicts from Gartner and the thing that stood out most for Rita was skills gap... Forrester has been saying IO pros need to evolve themselves as well so this is probably a thing.

  • Programmed Inequality, to fill the skills gap, look to hire more diversely.

  • Both talk serverless and fPaaS (Gartner predicts By 2020, the number of applications using serverless function PaaS will more than double from 2017, increasing real-time responsiveness of applications) and event-driven.

  • Forrester calls out integrated security … and immersive training programs.

Misc.

  • AI, actually think about new things you'd do: "If CIOs and chief data officers (CDOs) are serious about becoming insights driven, 2018 is the year they must realize that simplistic lift-and-shift approaches will only scratch the surface of possibilities that new tech offers." (Forrester).

  • Ben Evans "Ten Year Futures" presentation is a good example of "thinking outside the box" of the present when it comes to predicting how to apply new technology.

  • Gartner on ChatBots, probably dial back to it being pragmatic, doing commerce in milinum IM: "By 2021, more than 50% of enterprises will be spending more per annum on bots and chatbot creation than traditional mobile app development."

  • People haven't been getting enough value from data projects: "the number of global survey respondents at  firms with more than 100 terabytes of unstructured data has doubled since 2016.8 However, because older-generation text analytics platforms are so complex, only 32% of companies have successfully analyzed text data, and even fewer are analyzing other unstructured sources." This likely drives people to cloud solutions. (Ibid.)

  • Employee engagement won't improve. In the US, only 32% of employees are engaged — meaning they are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace. (Forrester - Predictions 2018: Employee Experience Powers The Future Of Work)

Our own

  • Rita: cloud native data is the big problem.

  • Richard: API economy becomes big.

  • Coté: DevOps becomes SRE. More predictions in Software Defined Talk #116.

Book to read for next year to get your head straight

About the Author

Michael Coté

Michael Coté works on the advocates team for VMware Tanzu. See @cote for more.

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