Bill Fenick, VP of enterprise at Interxion
Enterprises will be smarter about the cloud
The cloud has quickly become a mainstay in the enterprise. However, early on, many businesses dove into the cloud head first, and quickly realized that that not only are not all apps meant to be reengineered for the cloud, but even a lift and shift approach doesn’t always work. Because of this, in 2019, I believe that while enterprises will continue to adopt cloud in a more ferocious way, they’ll do it with a better layer of intelligence on top.
As companies increasingly integrate a variety of AI-driven technologies across voice, vision, language and machine learning in order to transform their businesses and get the competitive edge in 2019, I believe they will be leveraging cloud technologies as a matter of course.
Location is becoming more important to enterprises
Today’s enterprises have the need for speed. Regardless of it being application to application or application to end user, businesses need data to move faster than ever before. As a result, in 2019 I expect enterprises to pay closer attention to the location of their data, whether that’s the location in proximity to other data sources including the cloud, or geographic location.
Sally Bament, VP of Service Provider Marketing, Juniper Networks
5G will create a new billion-dollar app economy
The first smartphones and eventually LTE networks paved the way for mobile apps as we know them, giving rise to a multitude of new ways companies interact with customers. 5G is poised to go live in many cities across the United States and globally in 2019, and we expect next year to really showcase the economic power of the new mobile technology. This is the year apps start to show their real value in the enterprise and industrial space with a host of new IoT, AR/VR, digital twins and connected-car applications coming to life.
Two separate high-profile cybersecurity breaches will hit critical U.S. infrastructure
The increasing amount of distributed applications and data deployed in various parts of the cloud environments will increase sophisticated breaches. In the year ahead, we will likely see major attacks on systems of livelihood including utility systems, municipal water supplies and electrical grids. Predictive analytics and end-to-end monitoring are necessary tools to thwart catastrophic structural attacks.
Expect more frenemies in the edge
The hyperscale cloud players have clearly demonstrated the power of their massive networks in terms of application hosting and development. But it’s the telcos that have the beachfront property in their established network infrastructure that’s closest to end users. Cloud providers will try to build an edge of their own, but service providers will remain keepers of the edge as they can compete with much better economic scale. Over the next year, service providers and cloud providers will compete to win the edge but expect more cloud-SP partnerships to unfold as the year progresses.
Automation is the secret to customer satisfaction
In 2019, automation will be the differentiating factor among service providers. Early software and virtualization technology have provided some relief from stagnant development but this year service providers will fully adopt automated and virtualized cloud platforms that can deploy new services in months, not years. Those who fail to implement automation will find themselves years behind competitors, as end users will find more agility and better service with those who embrace automation
Dave Wright, President of the CBRS Alliance
Expect commercial launch in the 3.5 GHz CBRS Band -- Earlier this year, the FCC announced plans for the launch of commercial services in the CBRS 3.5 GHz band, a wide swath of lightly-used spectrum that currently has U.S. Department of Defense systems as its primary user. This new opportunity is enabled through the use of a dynamic sharing mechanism which protects the incumbent government operations while allowing new commercial services. OnGo solutions for the band will offer secure, cost-effective connectivity in the places it is needed most, and at a fraction of the cost that has historically been associated with cellular technologies. There is universal agreement that mid-band spectrum will be critical for next-generation wireless services, and CBRS is the first mid-band spectrum being made available in the US.
Organizations – including existing mobile, fixed wireless, and cable operators, as well as enterprises and industrial players – are already laying the groundwork for deployment. Testing and certification programs for equipment and devices operating within the 3.5 GHz band are well underway – with a number of radio infrastructure and client devices now authorized by the FCC. The testing of the dynamic sharing databases (SASs) is also well underway. The industry is ready for commercial deployment, and 2019 will be the year of improved wireless coverage and capacity on a massive scale.
Jon Toor, CMO, Cloudian
There’s No Place Like Home: Cloud Repatriation Increases: While the growth of the public cloud will remain strong, enterprises will expand their adoption of on-premises private clouds in a hybrid cloud model. This will include repatriating data from the public cloud to avoid the bandwidth, latency and cost issues that can arise when accessing such data.
Two Clouds Are Better Than One: More enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and enhance their business flexibility. However, a multi-cloud approach raises new management challenges that users will need to address to ensure a positive experience.
Object Storage: Ready, Camera, Production: Moving beyond its traditional use for large-scale archiving, object storage will play an increasing role in video production workflows. Offering a combination of limitless scalability, S3 compatibility and tremendous durability, object storage provides an ideal platform for managing video content, including over-the-top (OTT) distribution.
What Do You Get When You Mix Blue and Red?: IBM-Red Hat Deal Scrambles the Cloud Landscape – IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat will reverberate throughout 2019, giving enterprises more options for designing a multi-cloud strategy and highlighting the importance of data management tools that can work across public cloud, private cloud and traditional on-premises environments.
AI and Object Storage Play Tag: As businesses increase their use of AI to extract greater value from their digital assets, metadata tagging will become an even more critical element of enterprise storage. This will bring more attention to object storage, which is centered on metadata, and the key will be integrating well with AI tools.
Cloud Foundry Foundation’s Executive Director Abby Kearns and CTO Chip Childers
Consolidation will continue: Based on 2018’s acquisitions, we predict we’ll see a steady rollout of acquisitions in the next 12-18 months, as major enterprise tech companies rush to get a piece of the latest innovations. Shuffling in executive leadership at certain large companies is a telltale sign that acquisition opportunities will be used to grow business more rapidly. Consolidation around a specific technology is bound to happen, with the market solidifying around that tech.
Multi-platform will be the new normal: A majority of the market believes containers must be the solution to digital transformation, but in 2019, they’ll realize they’re just a tool -- not a silver bullet. We’re already seeing that companies are more broadly deploying a combination of technologies like PaaS, containers and platform in tandem, which we published in a report earlier this year. 2019 will be the year enterprises begin to embrace this versatility and see the flexibility, scalability and interoperability in a multi-platform solution.
People and process are more important than technology: In 2019, companies are going to realize the people on their teams matter more than anything. Reskilling their workforces is going to become essential to business success. Technology is evolving at the same rate as training, so most people with today’s desired skill sets are already employed. Organizations that build continuous learning cycles into their business model and upskill their employees will keep themselves ahead of the curve.
FaaS adoption will continue momentum: FaaS is a serverless technology. It’s already been adopted rapidly as glue code which will continue. However, its function as a productive way to build business applications is only beginning to take off. We will see the beginnings of an explosion of developer frameworks built on top of serverless systems. This type of tooling makes it easier to work with and build things with FaaS, so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Eyes to the east: Together, we’ve been to China seven separate times this year, and we are astonished at the pace of technological advancement there. With special interest in Artificial Intelligence, China is moving at lightning speed. In 2019, there will be global impact as China’s advancement pushes other regions to hasten their own development.
Scaling up, and quick: We’re seeing the momentum of scale steadily speed up as a result of continued enterprise adoption of cloud technologies. As the technologies mature and are integrated into cloud solutions, enterprises grow more familiar with them, gain trust in their value and increase adoption. It’s a virtuous cycle, which we wrote about in the Foundation’s latest research report, and it’s only going to start spinning faster in 2019.
Culture matters: We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your people and your processes are more important than your technology. In our most recent research, we found that nearly 50 percent of organizations believe culture change is a bigger obstacle than the technology itself. The shift to digital has to happen within your organization, and that means with your people. In 2019, companies are going to prioritize a new culture that emphasizes agile, integrative, inclusive workflow. It’s just another way the cloud market is restructuring.
