7 Predictions for 2015

7 Predictions for 2015

By Scott Hedrick
December 18th, 2014

1. Big data crosses the chasm 

Hadoop and NO SQL production deployments will grow significantly among large organizations as they gain experience and assemble solutions from commercial vendors. Companies leveraging increasing amounts and types of data will start to reap significant business advantage over companies that are laggards.

2. Mainstream enterprises accelerate their move to SaaS and hosted environments
As large organization become more comfortable about the security of the cloud, SaaS will continue to replace legacy on-premise apps at an increasing rate.  The rapidly maturing offerings and tools make data storage, processing and analytics in hosted environments start to get into mainstream adoption among large organizations as companies look to increase efficiency and agility.
3. IoT + big data

IoT reaches the early majority as companies collect all the data from millions of connected devices in #Hadoop data lakes.  The value will increase as this IoT data starts to be combined with existing enterprise and customer data to take the value of analytical insights to the next level.

4. AWS gets greater competition

AWS usage will continue to grow rapidly as large enterprises movement to Cloud and SaaS accelerates, but it dominance will be challenges and they will increasingly have to respond to competition.  Microsoft Azure is picking up steam and I expect Microsoft give more serious competition to AWS in 2015. Google continues to invest, but will struggle to gain marketshare against AWS without some aggressive moves. 

5. More big data companies  go IPO

On the heals of successful IPOs by Hortonworks #HDP and NewRelic #NEWR, 2015 will see them followed in what could become a stampede of big data companies rushing to go public.  This will fuel the industry to invest in the next innovations and startups. 

6. Mobile market increasingly resembles PCs

Market shares and profit splits between Android and iOS globally are looking increasingly like Windows and MacOS for PCs.  While Android has a nearly dominating marketshare, Apple has enough, especially of the high end users that spend more, that it can hold it’s own and will continue to attract outsized investment and innovation.  Like PCs, a majority of smart phone profits will go to Apple with most other players struggling to profit from increasingly hard to differentiate products. 

7. Privacy concerns rise for IoT

Consumer privacy concerns start to rise significantly in connected consumer devices, especially smart TVs and cars. Governments outside the Europe will continue to lag in regulation and consumers will become increasingly concerned about how their private behavior is being collected and analyzed.  This could come head as private data from homes and cars is used is revealed to be used not only in court to prosecute, but by governments and black hat hackers in the real world.