IT industry 2014 nine technology trends

Who would say IT companies now boring? Great thinking and bold new directions in technology are changing everything with unprecedented initiative, and it is time to consider the long-term implications.

The exciting 2013 is not over, but I can not wait to share my feelings about so many emerging trends. For this reason, I have prepared such a forward-looking outlook for the coming year. I originally thought I would make the predictive conclusion as the main content, but at this historic moment this year, many trends have begun to brew and initially bear fruit - I am sure most of them will be in the next ten Two months continue to maintain this good momentum.

Here is what I summed up and nine major technology trends, if you have their own friends, you may wish to share in the comment column.

1. Cloud computing becomes the new hardware form. Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal, apparently agrees with this conclusion. His argument is that major industries are beginning to take a revolution in the push of new computing platforms, from PCs to customers - servers to the Internet. In the server, storage, and networking space, devices work together to create a system that resembles a full-fledged set of "machines," where applications have extreme scalability, infrastructure must be integrated with virtualization and have central Control features - and that's what we call the "software-defined" concept. Ultimately, this trend will go beyond the unilateral claims of SDNs (software-defined networks) and begin to encompass every system in the data center - even with air-conditioning systems. Advanced software control plans proposed by public cloud providers will continue to progressively enter the corporate environment.

2. The interactive system is right. What is the scale of cloud scaling that we're going to exaggerate? Not for the older business "record systems" like ERP, where data models rarely change and we probably know how many customers will be using them. The main object of cloud computing power is the "interactive system": customer-oriented Web and mobile applications, their popularity will bring the entire market can not be ignored vibration effect.

Optimizing customer interactions has become the hottest technology area at the moment, and the resulting impetus has also been the source of elasticity for elastic infrastructures, new database technologies, and for collecting and analyzing big data (mainly Web-clickstreams and other user data). Big data analytics implemented using Hadoop-like applications is likely to be the single most technologically advanced and technologically advanced technology in the past decade. Followed by NoSQL database (such as MongoDB, Cassandra and Couchbase), its scalability is almost crazy, the data model used is also increasing.

Big data come first. Big data analytics brings us many compelling promises, but there are too many big data solutions in the short term, and relatively few issues need to be addressed. In the long run, the potential of big data is by no means limited to optimizing the e-commerce system. It will certainly be integrated into all vertical industries - everything from manufacturing to transportation to the power grid.

But for the verticals to enjoy the benefits of big data, the first is to achieve universal access to the industrial Internet (that is, what we often refer to as the "Internet of things"). Imagine a scenario where countless networked sensors provide extensive remote measurement data to improve product design and accurately predict failures. General Electric and IBM have made early leadership in this area, but we are still in their infancy. From now on, the industrial internet will rapidly spread over a long period of time in the years to come. By that time, big data will really become very large and its thirst for big data analytics will be even stronger than ever before. In the meantime, big data will bear the brunt of some of the technical bubbles that eventually burst in 2014.

4. Cloud integration stand out. Because of the lack of migration convenience for big data because of its size, more and more data is now stored directly in the cloud for processing by cloud analytics. In general, cloud solutions, especially SaaS applications that handle data storage in their own right, are likely to give corporate users the same sort of isolation as they used to. In other words, the actual differences between products are very small, but customer records are scattered across different data storage systems that are isolated from each other (along with valuable processes that should have been shared).

To solve this problem, there are two answers to the question: cloud integration and more and better API. Cloud integration solutions abound, with notable ones being Cordys, Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron, Informatica, Layer 7, MuleSoft, SnapLogic and WSO2. In addition, APIs obviously have their own alliances - such as the new API solution offered by Apigee, which allows organizations to publish and maintain their own public APIs.

5. Authentication represents a new security mechanism. Although this statement is somewhat exaggerated, in fact, authentication has now become an integral part of internal and SaaS applications. Managing who has been there before and retrieving them before employees leave the company - is becoming more and more important and increasingly complex. Microsoft, Okta, Salesforce, and many others have started rolling out solutions. Without the support of cloud authentication management, enterprises simply can not implement public cloud solutions securely and efficiently.

6. Memory becomes the new storage mechanism. Expansion of memory capacity reflected in two aspects. On the software side, every relational database vendor is adding in-memory capabilities to its products primarily to meet the needs of analytical tasks and significantly reduce the time consumed by large-scale processing efforts. In terms of hardware, various solutions represented by PernixData begin to utilize flash memory to create larger distributed caches among servers, thus greatly reducing the proportion of read and write operations that must be directed to the SAN.

7. The way to the future is paved with JavaScript. We are now facing a whole new era with all kinds of mobile devices (including newer TVs and cars) - here client hardware is showing an unprecedented diversity. No one wants to maintain a separate set of native client applications for each platform. If you want to have only one set of code bases on your maintenance list, your application must run on top of your browser - in other words, our product must belong to a JavaScript / HTML5 application.

No wonder there will be new JavaScript frameworks coming up almost every week, and websites such as Famo.us will continue pushing messages to convey to us the latest creative uses of JavaScript. In addition, the cross-platform mobile development environment (such as PhoneGap) also allows easy conversion of JavaScript applications to native applications.

8. Enterprise developers turned to PaaS. So far, PaaS's major customer base is commercial software developers and professional service providers. However, as more and more enterprises launch their own Web and mobile applications, internal developers will also gradually find the benefits of the PaaS solution - the key options on the market today include Microsoft Azure, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Red Hat OpenShift And SalesForce Heroku. They all provide flexible coding mechanisms, test environments, and the ability to deploy applications in the cloud.

IBM's all-out push for Cloud Foundry this year can be a major milestone - a move that could dissuade business users from worrying about placing their code above the platforms of other vendors. In addition, IDC also made a prediction that the industry-specific PaaS products (including the pre-set services for specific vertical industries) will usher in the rise.

9. Developers continue to dominate everything. If you want to find a common thread among these predictions, Marc Andreessen's assertion two years ago is once again validated - the software is engulfing the world. With so many platforms for which code needs to be written - and even now the data center infrastructure itself has become programmable - the number of existing developers certainly will not be able to meet such a huge demand. Salary and position given in the hiring market is getting higher - at least for job seekers with the right combination of skills. We can not help but ask: how can we better and more effectively train professionals with these skills?

These nine major trends represent the great changes that are about to take place in a short time. At least we can say that these trends will have an interesting impact on the IT industry. To sum it up, if software begins to define the infrastructure, the hardware will become more commoditized - including networked devices. If the direction of application development becomes clearer, that is, we will eventually write applications that run on any client device, then the choice of platform to run will no longer matter.

At the same time, there has also been a permanent change in the way software is delivered. IBM, Oracle, SAP and other traditional vendors, often rooted in the enterprise user environment, can continue to maintain their competitive edge, but what's exciting new additions to it? The main alternative answer may be open source, SaaS or low-cost mobile applications. In my opinion, although many emerging companies have been acquired, most of the industry players may need to re-adjust their earnings forecasts.

For two emerging areas of cloud computing and mobile, enterprise IT departments must find new ways to handle it - because they no longer have the supremacy of control. In most organizations, managers are beginning to realize that in order to remain competitive in the marketplace, they need to deploy a wide range of Web and mobile applications to their customers and observe their effectiveness. Can IT get the skills it needs in a timely manner to meet the needs brought by these trends, or is it possible for business executives to turn to SaaS programs, agile developers or other external providers for help, The answer has not yet been announced, I will wait and see.