2017 Enterprise Technology Trends
Unlike last year when I waited until nearly April to make my annual Technology Trends post, I figured I'd get it done at a more traditional time.
So here's where we are heading....
The big three trends continue to move forward. Hyper Convergence, Open Networking and Micro Services.
The Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market has started to get more crowded as more and more vendors jump into the market. But the overall movement to local storage based compute using all flash or SSD/HDD hybrid will continue. It's a very compelling technology and the vendors are rapidly pushing to support more and more enterprise application profiles (i.e. Oracle RAC) and larger capacity. While traditional storage models are still viable, the trend will be to buy them less and move towards HCI.
Open networking is moving forward but not as quickly. Networking purchases tend to be on a slower pace than compute, and with Cisco promoting one SDN approach with ACI and the Open crowd promoting another with ONIE based commodity hardware and Linux, it's going to take a few more years for this trend to become the norm.
Micro Services however are here to stay. Whether based on Docker, Kubernetes or Cloud Services like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, this modular approach to applications is transforming the way we have thought about apps and will continue to grow. Once a company has developed specific micro service constructs, they can be reused over and over.
On the vendor side, the Dell/EMC merger is now complete. But it will take some time before the cultures will merge and some of the trends I have discussed above will impact the new overall company.
HPE sold off their Enterprise Services Unit (the old EDS) to CSC for some $8B (about half of it's revenue). With Dell shedding its Enterprise Services (the old Perot systems) to NTT Data as part of the EMC merger, the hardware folks are trying to return to a more focused model. I still believe that the new Dell will return to the public markets in 2019.
Cisco's business is pretty flat. While they have seen increases in the Security segment, core switch revenue and servers continue falling. Company's simply need less switch ports than they have in the past and with the movement towards cloud will need even less in the years ahead. And while Cisco recently introduced their HyperFlex line of HCI devices, they are really a me too model and not very innovative. Without a good storage story Cisco will continue to struggle in the enterprise server market.
So will they merge with NetApp ? Maybe but I doubt it. The interesting piece will be the impact on VCE. With Dell/EMC the trend would be to replace the current Vblock solution with an all Dell/EMC solution which will put a big dent in Cisco's server sales. It may not happen in 2017, but I believe it will in 2018.
Microsoft will continue to see growth in Office365 and Azure. MS continues to invest heavily there and the offerings continue to expand. Where I believe MS is going to struggle is in the Enterprise Server OS market. When you look at most of the new app platforms, so Big Data, IoT, Analytics, Containers, etc, the innovation and new projects are coming from the Open Source community running on Linux, not Windows Server. And with many core services like AD, File Sharing and Email moving to the Cloud, I expect more companies will most likely NOT expand their Windows Server portfolio. MS does have a really good story with SQL Server, but on prem Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business will shrink.
AWS like Azure will also continue to grow. Earlier in 2016 AWS & VMware put in place a potential game changing partnership that will allow customers to easily move existing VM workloads to AWS. The initial offerings are expected mid 2017, and if they get traction, could accelerate the overall movement from corporate data centers to cloud. In my opinion this was probably the most significant deal in 2016. While new apps are being created in the cloud, the rest of the iceberg is in legacy apps sitting in corporate data centers. As I stated in my post at the announcement this has the potential to be a huge game changer and drive significant revenue for both companies.
Finally I could commit an entire post to security, but I will simply state that the NGFW and Security appliance vendors will do okay. Even though the frequency and intensity of breaches continue to grow, the market generally seems to be more reactive than proactive.
Have a great 2017...
So here's where we are heading....
The big three trends continue to move forward. Hyper Convergence, Open Networking and Micro Services.
The Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market has started to get more crowded as more and more vendors jump into the market. But the overall movement to local storage based compute using all flash or SSD/HDD hybrid will continue. It's a very compelling technology and the vendors are rapidly pushing to support more and more enterprise application profiles (i.e. Oracle RAC) and larger capacity. While traditional storage models are still viable, the trend will be to buy them less and move towards HCI.
Open networking is moving forward but not as quickly. Networking purchases tend to be on a slower pace than compute, and with Cisco promoting one SDN approach with ACI and the Open crowd promoting another with ONIE based commodity hardware and Linux, it's going to take a few more years for this trend to become the norm.
Micro Services however are here to stay. Whether based on Docker, Kubernetes or Cloud Services like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, this modular approach to applications is transforming the way we have thought about apps and will continue to grow. Once a company has developed specific micro service constructs, they can be reused over and over.
On the vendor side, the Dell/EMC merger is now complete. But it will take some time before the cultures will merge and some of the trends I have discussed above will impact the new overall company.
HPE sold off their Enterprise Services Unit (the old EDS) to CSC for some $8B (about half of it's revenue). With Dell shedding its Enterprise Services (the old Perot systems) to NTT Data as part of the EMC merger, the hardware folks are trying to return to a more focused model. I still believe that the new Dell will return to the public markets in 2019.
Cisco's business is pretty flat. While they have seen increases in the Security segment, core switch revenue and servers continue falling. Company's simply need less switch ports than they have in the past and with the movement towards cloud will need even less in the years ahead. And while Cisco recently introduced their HyperFlex line of HCI devices, they are really a me too model and not very innovative. Without a good storage story Cisco will continue to struggle in the enterprise server market.
So will they merge with NetApp ? Maybe but I doubt it. The interesting piece will be the impact on VCE. With Dell/EMC the trend would be to replace the current Vblock solution with an all Dell/EMC solution which will put a big dent in Cisco's server sales. It may not happen in 2017, but I believe it will in 2018.
Microsoft will continue to see growth in Office365 and Azure. MS continues to invest heavily there and the offerings continue to expand. Where I believe MS is going to struggle is in the Enterprise Server OS market. When you look at most of the new app platforms, so Big Data, IoT, Analytics, Containers, etc, the innovation and new projects are coming from the Open Source community running on Linux, not Windows Server. And with many core services like AD, File Sharing and Email moving to the Cloud, I expect more companies will most likely NOT expand their Windows Server portfolio. MS does have a really good story with SQL Server, but on prem Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business will shrink.
AWS like Azure will also continue to grow. Earlier in 2016 AWS & VMware put in place a potential game changing partnership that will allow customers to easily move existing VM workloads to AWS. The initial offerings are expected mid 2017, and if they get traction, could accelerate the overall movement from corporate data centers to cloud. In my opinion this was probably the most significant deal in 2016. While new apps are being created in the cloud, the rest of the iceberg is in legacy apps sitting in corporate data centers. As I stated in my post at the announcement this has the potential to be a huge game changer and drive significant revenue for both companies.
Finally I could commit an entire post to security, but I will simply state that the NGFW and Security appliance vendors will do okay. Even though the frequency and intensity of breaches continue to grow, the market generally seems to be more reactive than proactive.
Have a great 2017...
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