In addition to inspiring “best of” lists across every sector and industry, the New Year is also often a time when technologists are called upon to make predictions about the coming year. Even though January is still a few weeks away, Jeremy Burton, EMC’s President of Products and Marketing, has gotten a jump on the New Year with a few prognostications about the future of storage and computing that caught our eye.
In addition to inspiring “best of” lists across every sector and industry, the New Year is also often a time when technologists are called upon to make predictions about the coming year. Even though January is still a few weeks away, Jeremy Burton, EMC’s President of Products and Marketing, has gotten a jump on the New Year with a few prognostications about the future of storage and computing that caught our eye.
One trend that EMC is betting will continue unabated is the growth of mobile devices not only as an asset for device owners but for the businesses who cater to mobile device owners. 2014 has been a year when we have seen an increasing number of enterprise storage and compute platforms offering management via mobile device. In addition to paying attention to opportunities for corporate IT staff and employees to interact with its technologies, EMC says that it is tracking the ways that retail businesses can leverage data from their customers’ mobile devices. The concept of using customer location and other individual data to direct the customer’s attention to relevant products and services while they are in the store is not a new one, but the underlying technologies to make it possible have remained immature so far. If EMC is correct about this trend in 2015, the upshot is that implementing these technologies will require real-time processing of impressive quantities of data with high speed storage and compute platforms in order for mobile-based customer interactions to be possible while they are still relevant to the customer.
Another of EMC’s bets for 2015 is the growing dominance of software-defined data center architectures. According to Burton, his division anticipates that storage hardware will increasingly serve as the underlying platform for storage software, where most innovation will be focused. EMC believes that the entire data center, from storage arrays to servers to network systems, will eventually be managed by software.
At the same time as data centers will be defined more and more by their software ecosystem, EMC anticipates that software development will take advantage of this environment by becoming less centralized; while IT management will remain within centralized planning and operational structures, Burton predicts that software development within the enterprise will increasingly be based within individual business units.
The rest of Jeremy's thoughts can be found in a blog post here.
