At this time of year, it is customary to look back at the past 12 months and make some random or not-so-random guesses as to what will happen over the coming 12. As such, what could be more fitting for my final post of 2016?!
Here’s a few of my personal best, worst, and easy guess candidates for 2017…
Tekhead Predictable Tech Predictions 2017
Easy Guesses
Come on Alex, even Penfold could have predicted these!
- AWS will continue to dominate the cloud market, though the rate at which they deploy new features will start to slow (over 1000 a year is pretty unsustainable!). Their revenues will continue to grow at gangbuster rates, however their market share will be slightly eroded as people experiment more with their competitors too.
- Microsoft Azure will grow massively (not quite 100% but not far off it). Their main growth will probably be in hosting enterprises and typical line of business applications as people move their legacy junk into the cloud. The recent announcements of the Single Instance VM SLA of 99.9% will definitely accelerate this as customers will feel less include to refactor their applications for cloud.
- Distributed everything!
- Docker will start to become more mainstream production and less Dev/Test.
- Google will kill off at least one popular service with multiple millions of users.
- The homelab market will reduce as people do more and more of their studying in the cloud.
- Podcasting will become the new blogging (if it hasn’t already!)
- DellEMC will continue to hack off bits of its anatomy to pay back that cheeky little $67Bn debt.
- I continue to use memes as a crutch to make my otherwise lifeless articles marginally more interesting!
Best Guesses
Its on the cards… maybe?
- Google will continue to be ignored by most enterprises for Cloud IaaS. They will gain some reasonable growth in the web application space after another mass marketing activity to developers, ISVs and hosters.
- Oracle grows Cloud revenues 50% or more but market share remains small. Their growth is mainly driven by IaaS revenue as customers begin to move their workloads to be closer to their data in the Oracle PaaS and SaaS services.
- There will be no major storage company IPO in 2017, i.e. over $200m.
- Many storage startups will run out of funding and die on the vine (depressing I know!). Their IP will be snapped up by the old guard storage companies in the proceeding fire sales…
- 3D XPoint will begin to creep into storage arrays by the end of the year, fuelling another storage VC funding bubble for at least another 12 months for any company who claims to have an innovative way to use it.
- A major cloud provider suffers a global outage.
Worst Guesses
These probably won’t happen, but if any of them do, I’ll claim smugly that I knew they were always going to!
- Pure Storage will make an acquisition of a storage startup to create their third product line, perhaps a secondary storage company (i.e. not just all flash) along the lines of Cohesity.
- Cisco will buy a storage company. They will be more successful at integrating it than they were with Whiptail! (Which wouldn’t be difficult… 😮 )
- Spanning a single application over multiple clouds becomes a real possibility, as one or more startups come out of stealth to provide innovative ways to span clouds. Nobody buys into it, except maybe for DR.
- Tekhead.it becomes the most read blog in the world in 2017
- Cats take over the planet and dogs are forced to form a rebel alliance which is ultimately victorious when a chihuahua takes out the entire cat leadership in one go, with a stolen reaper drone.
- Jonah Hill wins Strictly Come Dancing, narrowly defeating Frankie Boyle and Charlie Brooker in the final.
And finally…
Here’s wishing you all an awesome, fun and prosperous 2017!