1. Nobody gets fired for having a cloud strategy – In 2015 every company will need a cloud strategy (public and/or private) within their datacenter to remain agile in the market and responsive to customer needs. As big data continues to be the hot topic for companies across all industries, utilizing the cloud will become even more important to help balance the datacenter.
2. Disk and flash remain at 10x difference – Disk and flash arrays will continue to fight it out with performance and pricing battles. Flash array providers will say that disk is outdated and flash can provide 10x better perform (and also claim it does this at the same price as disk). Disk array providers continue the narrative that not all workloads and datasets are suitable for flash and switching to flash will cost the customer 10x more than they expected.
3. IoT finally makes sense – In 2015, companies will finally understand how the Internet of Things makes a difference for business. As we see products like Nest and Smart Fridges creating the ‘Smart Home,’ it’s only a matter of time before this theme expands to create ‘Smart Businesses’ (wristwatch time clocks for hourly employees, desk chairs that send alerts to phones when employee has been sitting for too long). However, with IoT also comes growing amounts of data. With an increased amount of data comes the need to enhance one’s storage strategy, and companies will be looking for robust solutions that let them fully embrace IoT.
4. Hybrid cloud will become the norm – The cloud is becoming a must for almost all businesses, but they still need to balance on-prem security/policies with the convenience and the cloud. It will become the norm in storage and compute.
5. Flexibility in cloud providers will become a must-have for businesses – Vendors that can easily integrate with or provide flexible cloud-based services will have the edge and be able to change cloud providers as the industry matures. Companies can onramp AND offramp data migrations between providers. It will be as easy as switching channels on a television with a remote control.
Please feel free to use any of these predictions if you are working on end-of-year wrap-ups and 2015 forecasts — all we ask is that you attribute it to