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With Snap’s IPO reportedly imminent and the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas now wrapped up, many in the tech world have been focused on innovations in consumer technology lately. But I think the coming year also will be marked by lesser-noticed tectonic shifts in enterprise-IT: Trends related to cloud computing, big data, and even basic computer chips, which are getting a makeover thanks to the new demands placed on them by the deluge of data and analytics now swamping many organizations.
These trends may not be as sexy as chat apps or talking robots. But here are my predictions for seven B2B, enterprise-IT trends to watch in 2017 — trends that will drive billions in corporate IT spending and could eventually create billions in market value.
1. Cloud computing moves from the “core” into the “fog.” Amazon’s meteoric ascent to the top of the hot cloud-computing market was driven by its ability to cheaply and effectively move core IT functions — including basic computing, networking, and storage — out of company datacenters into the public “cloud.” With cloud computing, customers pay as they go for computing power, much as homeowners pay utilities for the electricity they consume each month. In 2017, however, I predict we’ll see the rise of “fog”, or “edge” computing, through which data thrown off by billions of smart, Web-enabled devices at the edge of computer networks (where they actually touch people) drives interesting applications. Think of self-driving Teslas, Nest-controlled smart homes, or robots powering smart manufacturing and oil-drilling. The migration of $300 billion in datacenter spend to the core cloud is clearly a big deal, but the emergence of edge clouds driving new revenues in industries previously untouched by advanced cloud technologies may be a significantly larger opportunity, and I expect to see early signs of this in 2017.
2. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — better late than never! Despite stealing all the headlines, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’s) $13 billion cloud business is barely scratching the surface of the total market for IT datacenter spending. In 2016 we witnessed a watershed moment when #1 enterprise player VMware essentially threw in the towel and agreed to partner, instead of compete, with AWS. (The deal will allow customers to use their existing VMware software to run some computing in Amazon’s cloud.) The deal will actually encourage cautious CIOs to go all-in with public-private cloud combos as opposed to continuing to funnel IT spending into datacenters. This should help Microsoft Azure, another big cloud-computing player, since the company already has a big enterprise presence and a cloud program that CIOs can tap into. Clouds run by Google and China’s Alibaba could similarly benefit. I think by 2017, we’ll see a sort of oligopoly of four or five big cloud providers, similar to…