The lesson learned here is that no matter
how well positioned a company may be in
its industry, it can never rest on its laurels.
One of the biggest drivers of change and
disruption in any industry is the emer-
gence of new technologies. Companies
who sit on the sidelines and bypass these
new technology trends risk becoming the
next Blockbuster or Kodak. But what is
even scarier is companies that embrace
these emerging technologies are able to
innovate so quickly, that other companies
that are just dipping their toes in the
water are being left i n the dust. Business
agility is the new currency.
These strategic technologies have a few
characteristics in common.
• They require massive amounts of
infrastructure to process at scale
• They are ingesting and processing
petabytes or exabytes of data
• The underlying infrastructure, data-
bases and middleware are extremely
complex to implement in the legacy
DIY (do it yourself) model
• The applications that leverage these
technologies are elastic in nature
These four characteristics fall into the
sweet spot of public clouds. Elastic appli-
cations are best suited for on-demand
resources. This is a core value proposition
of the cloud. Buying excess capacity for
unpredictable spikes in demand is some-
thing a CIO who wants to keep his job
should not be practicing in this day and
age. Private cloud advocates will claim
that they can provide elasticity at a lower
cost and with more control. I can argue
against that in another article for another
day. But that argument becomes irrele-
vant when you add the platform’s capabil-
ities and managed services that these
cloud providers offer.
Three themes — intelligent,
digital, and mesh — form the
basis for the Top 10 strategic
technology trends for 2017.
These technologies are just
beginning to break out of an
emerging state and stand to
have substantial disruptive
potential across industries.
- Gartner .
SUMMER 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 51