Top 5 Technology Predictions for 2017

GreenPages CTO, Chris Ward, provides us with his technology predictions for 2017:

1. All Flash is here to stay.  We’ve seen wider and wider adoption of all-flash arrays for general purpose use in 2016 and I expect that to rapidly expand into 2017.  If you’re in the market for on-premise storage and you’re not looking at next generation vendors like Nimble, Pure, Infinidat, etc then you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.  The former empires of EMC, HP, and Hitachi are crumbling quickly.

2. Software Defined Networking will continue its rapid adoption pace.  Like all flash, 2016 has seen a rapid expansion SDN solutions across the marketplace.  Driven mostly by security requirements like micro-segmentation, but once in place customers tend to adopt more advanced features such as virtualized routing and network configuration automation. 

3. 2017 will be the year of Windows 10 in the Enterprise.  I have thought for a while that Windows 7 would be the next XP and last forever in the enterprise due to the pain of rolling out major upgrades, however, Windows 10 has a lot to bring to the table.  The ability to manage Windows 10 via Enterprise Mobility Management platforms alone will drive a lot of adoption, but other benefits such as better performance and security will make it easier to pull the trigger. 

4. The Cloud Wars will come to an end in 2017.  2016 has seen the demise of several big name vendor backed clouds including Cisco, HP, and VMware.  Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the destinations of choice and that is undisputed.  Google and IBM have a slice of the pie but pale in comparison to Amazon and Microsoft.  I do see Amazon and Microsoft diverging from one another a bit as most test/dev, large analytical, and large cloud-native scale out applications tend to lean towards AWS while enterprise and productivity use cases lean towards Azure.  It’s going to be a multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud world and you had better be reinventing yourself yet again if you expect to stay in this industry for long!

5. Cell phones on airplanes.  Please, if anyone at the FAA or FCC are reading this, don’t allow people to have cell phone conversations while in flight!  I’m totally fine with Wi-Fi and email access on a 6-hour ride across the country, but a handful of people have phone conversations is a bit too much. On the bright side, at least Netflix has added an offline mode, so now I can binge watch my favorite shows during my flights!

Check out our recent article, Dish Network is Thriving Because of Transformation, to learn about how transformation can be applied to IT

By Chris Ward, CTO, GreenPages Technology Solutions