GURU advisor's predictions for the IT sector in 2016

2016 has already been here for a couple of weeks and lots of predictions have been made. We too decided to think about the promises 2016 will bring with itself, in particular regarding the themes we follow, like small business and Enterprise IT.

Talking about Cloud Computing is quite predictable, we’ve seen a consolidation of this trend in the previous years with a significant growth of those players that are the strongest in this sector.
In particular Amazon with its AWS Web Services kept on riding the wave being a few steps ahead of competitors: who has seriously implemented such solutions has powered off datacenters and on-premises server and now totally -or almost- relies on these technologies.

Before rushing headlong into a fleeting enthusiasm, it’s worth to clearly remember about two concepts that, in my opinion, will get even more important through 2016.

Be it an on-premises datacenter migrated into the cloud or just a single server, what makes the difference is a real, concrete underlying project.

Often I find myself talking about this topic with resellers and technicians and I notice that in many cases it’s not the choice of a product or of a provider to be the stepping lane between a good service and a bad service, but rather the adoption of a clear strategy and a well-structured project.
Otherwise -cloud or not- some problems will raise. Amazon Web Services, due to the huge amount of features and functions, are perhaps the most difficult to manage and coordinate in this sense, at least if you don’t know the platform deeply.
In the next year I expect that the distinction will get more obvious between those who simply resell a VPS or some kind of packages and those who provide an all-around service with disaster recovery and a security concept at the basis of the same project.
The same idea holds for companies whose IT department is internal: services provided inside the walls or in the Cloud must be planned with a logic.

Cloud Native Applications: the graph from the blog by Massimo Re Ferre illustrates the basic concepts of the new way of creating projects.

It’s the Cloud Native Applications concept introduced by VMware in last 2015 to be part of this new way of creating projects. Not just because of news on a technological standpoint (which we’ve talked here and here in great detail), but rather because of the idea itself of applications developed in a cloud logic where -as Massimo Re Ferre (VMware) explained in his blog- infrastructure becomes a code to execute and works despite being stateless, ephemeral, transient and of little reliability. Tools that can automate these procedures and manage multi-cloud systems (like Cloudforms, which Alessandro Perilli -Red Hat- spoke about) will experience a significant growth in 2016 and will be taken into account by an increasing number of companies.

Servers -intended as pure hardware- will maintain their growth trend, considering the growing number of Cloud Providers and so-called Cloud Providers that will make investments in 2016. Actually, there will probably be a drop, with only the best, or the “big ones”, that will buy servers custom-designed and with dedicated specs, like the ones used by Google or Facebook, which even made open source its Open Compute Project. Shortly, in 3-4 years, the market will remain florid in our opinion, and it will necessarily improve on the energetic sandpoint, with more powerful devices consuming less energy, thus reducing the needed resources to dissipate heat, too.

However, in general, the growth of servers will be dragged by the growing number of applications that will pass through virtual platform (let’s think about SDN solutions like NSX). We also predict an increase of storage solutions that use standard hardware solutions: the availability of an increasing number of operating systems planned to create software appliances for storage management will be, in our opinion, one of the trends in the sectors where the Tbyte/price is fundamental, while in the upper tier only the All-Flash storages, planned to work with SSD, will remain.

SSDs will act as master in almost every sector (server, storage, desktop, notebook) with a probable overtaking in the per-Gbyte cost also those sectors where disks still dominate the market (a few days ago the first 13 GB SSD has been announced…).

Hyperconvergent systems will experience a significant growth in 2016, too. As people realize about the importance of a coherent project for the whole infrastructure, the adoption of all-in-one systems will grow, bringing a solutions where storage, hypervisor, networking and management components are integrated in a single, well engineered platform. In this sector, in our opinions, there will be 2 main kinds of players: those who will be persuasive in the upper tier, the Enterprise level, where system has to be scalable upward keeping the same easy approach, without renouncing to any function; and those who will propose a compact, cheap and easy system that can replace traditional servers while maintaining the reliability and features of a more complex platform.

In the Mobile sector, according to us, there will be an overall levelling of endpoints, with a growth in managed solutions about security and platforms management. The Mobile Device Management solutions will experience a good thrust on the market and the ones that will consolidate their position will be the ones that can manage an heterogeneous infrastructure in a centralized manner, controlling not just tablets and smartphones but also desktop and notebook, thus eliminating several implementation difficulties of the actual IT.

On an SMB level we expect a growth of the Managed Service Providers model with an increasing number of companies providing not hardware and labour, but rather managed services with high added value.
Unfortunately in this case -at least in Italy- we expect a slow growth and that 2016 won’t bring this evolution to an end, but to a slow, albeit relentless, grow.

Finally, the sector that will grow the most is, due to the widespreading IT crime, will be security. Attacks to on-premises and Cloud systems will be more frequent, and at the same time the war at terrorism will make some controls even stricter and laws that regulate data management (your own and third-parties) will increase.
The increment of laws in Europe about privacy management will lead to the formation of new figures and to an even greater gap between compliant companies (with related costs) and companies that ignore or laws or are not evidently compliant.

In this big scenario, being update and understand how the IT world is evolving will be harder.
That’s why we hope GURU advisor will be helpful, with updated reviews and articles, and live updates of the most important events, like the Mobile World Congress that we’ll talk about on the next issue.