Predictions for 2016
As told by SureSkills CTO Kevin Reid for TechPro Magazine.
The founder of philosophical Taoism, Lao-Tzu, was guarded about predicting the future, stating “Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge”. While there is astuteness in that view, having been asked to make predictions for the world of technology in 2016 I must at least pretend that Lao-Tzu may not have been 100% accurate.
Owing to the fact that the world of technology is such a fast-changing one, I will make the following predictions for what will be the big trends and opportunities for 2016.
- The Cloud is here to stay and organisations will continue to tweak what version of the hybrid model best fits their business. AWS, VMWare, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and many other cloud providers will increase the choices available
- The purchase of EMC by Dell will see two of the world’s biggest tech companies come together. Other huge vendors could follow their lead in an industry where big is increasingly beautiful
- Expect the year to be fast moving as the rate of technology innovation continues to rise. Moore’s Law isn’t going anywhere either so everything will continue to get faster, fitter and smaller
- With the Irish economy continuing to fightback and grow, finance departments - with a bit of gentle persuasion, naturally - are loosening the purse strings and IT will have more resources to invest in their environments. Expect a lot of this to go on adding value in the form of improving IT services internally and externally
- A report earlier this year by Cisco and DHL found that there will probably be 50 billion devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020. With approximately 15 billion on the IoT today, there’s a lot to happen to fulfil that prediction. We should see huge use of the IoT to deliver new solutions next year
- There will be an increasing focus on IT Service Management, with a particular emphasis on security. Distributed environments need a structured approach and expect Axelos’ (owner of ITIL, PRINCE2 and Resilia) frameworks to tackle this, with Resilia becoming big news
- Enhanced investment in, and use of, Monitoring and Measurement tools. IT departments making investments will want to ensure their systems are delivering therequired performance and availability
- Implementing smart data collection and filtering to reduce the impact and costs associated with data storage
- Delivering services everywhere – expand current solutions to be available on multiple devices and on any network. It’s a world that lives on the go and technology will have to continue to evolve to support this fast-paced world
While these predictions for 2016 make sense from the perspective of current trends and expected technological advances in the near future, IT has surprised us all with unexpected game-changing developments so don’t rule it out. Perhaps I will leave you with some words of wisdom about the future from English footballer Paul Gascoigne, who said: “I would never predict anything, and I never will,” wisdom perhaps veiled in contradiction. Happy 2016 to you all!