Acronis - http://bit.ly/2kYbDd6

THREE MAJOR CLOUD ADOPTION TRENDS FOR 2017

• Cloud adoption by SMBs

“SMBs will be the driving force behind cloud adoption, not only because the cloud presents an amazing and cost-effective opportunity to utilize the services they are not able to afford in-house, but also because it's the easiest and scalable market demographic for service providers to drive sales.”

• From traditional distributors to cloud service providers

“The classical distribution model, which involves moving physical boxes of hardware and software to provide service to customers, is rapidly changing shape.”

• True cloud architecture

“In the next 12-18 months we'll see a strong trend toward creating a true cloud architecture, which will become the foundation of the cloud industry. It's very different from just provisioning individual services to individual customers. It's all about the management and service delivery layer that sits on top of the actual commodity cloud services.”

Jan-Jaap Jager, General Manager of the Cloud Business Unit

Catalogic Software - http://bit.ly/2krd6Fw

THE YEAR OF VERUCA SALT, THE SELF -SERVICE END USER

“In 2017 we'll start to see The Year of the Self-Service End User. What does that mean? It means that data users (reporting, analytics, dev-test, DevOps, and so on) are getting tired of waiting on IT, and IT is pretty fed up with the constant demands of data users (faster, faster!).

Legacy IT processes just can't satisfy the demand. It's not IT's fault; you can't get beer from a cow. Legacy IT is built to be reliable, secure, cost-effective. It's not built to be fast. Fast = trouble. Fair enough.

But users want fast. My alternate name for 2017 is The Year Veruca Salt Took Over the Data Center. You remember her from Willy Wonka (the original, not the god forsaken remake)? She's that impatient girl that always demanded, "I want it now!" She sang a very demanding song, right before she got tossed into that bad egg contraption.”

“Yup, it's an on-demand world. But if IT can't deliver, then what? Dare I say it: Copy Data Management to the rescue, again.”

Peter Eicher, Director of Marketing

Commvault - http://bit.ly/2lvXL7u

CLOUDY FORECAST FOR 2017 WITH SOFTWARE DEFINED STORAGE AND SECURITY IN THE NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT

N. Robert Hammer, chairman, president and CEO

• Software Defined Storage

“2017 will be a year where enterprises move software defined storage out of the lab and into production. Software defined storage has proved that it can reduce legacy hardware expenses while also delivering the performance and scalability needed for big data, digital repository, backup and other large digital workloads.”

• The Shakeup of the Storage Industry

“As enterprises increasingly seek to deploy new technologies and more cloud services, point solution vendors will fall by the wayside in favor of providers that can deliver powerful data management platforms that simplify and automate the management of today's ever growing, ever more complicated data environments.”

• The Talent Pool

“All enterprises will need to adopt radical talent acquisition and retention strategies that emphasize process without bureaucracy if they hope to not only secure and keep skilled and motivated employees, but also ensure that all these employees are 'rowing together' in full alignment with the enterprise's business goals.”

Datacore Software - http://bit.ly/2kNaRxj

PARALLEL PROCESSING SOFTWARE WILL BE A 'PRODUCTIVITY DISRUPTER' AND GAM E CHANGER IN 20 17

George Teixeira, President and CEO

“With so much computing power still sitting idle - despite all of the incredible technology advancements that have occurred - in 2017, the time is right for parallel processing software to go mainstream and unleash the immense processing power of today's multicore systems to positively disrupt the economic and productivity impact of what computing can do and where it can be applied.

New software innovations will make 2017 a breakout year for parallel processing. The key is that the software has to become simple to use and non-disruptive to applications to allow it to move from specialized use cases to general application usage. By doing so, the impact of this will be massive because application performance, enterprise workloads and greater consolidation densities on virtual platforms and in cloud computing that have been stifled by the growing gap between compute and I/O will no longer be held back. This will be realized with new parallel I/O software technologies now available that are easy to use, require no changes to the applications and are capable of fully leveraging the power of multicores to dramatically increase productivity and overcome the I/O bottleneck that has been holding back our industry; this is the catalyst of change.”

Infinio - http://bit.ly/2kruWZ1

HYPERCONVERGENCE CUSTOMERS AND VENDORS CHASE PERFORM ANCE

Sheryl Koenigsberg, Senior Director of Marketing

• All-flash VSAN goes mainstream

“We see VMware leading their customers to all-flash configurations, upping the ante on performance for HCI.”

• Storage-class memory ("SCM")

“With the availability of next-generation persistent memory technology expected in 2017, vendors are eager to incorporate this exciting new technology into their platforms. Given that it's expected to be 10X times as fast as flash, SCM should always be deployed server-side, to avoid flooding the network infrastructures.”

• Nutanix's acquisition of PernixData

“If the industry's hottest storage IPO (and an HCI vendor) acquiring a performance-enhancing platform isn't a sign that performance is about to become very important to HCI, then we don't know what is.”

Liquidware Labs - http://bit.ly/2kTCVS8

2017: THE YEAR DAAS AND CLOUD -HOSTED DESKTOP TAKES FLIGHT

Jason E. Smith, Vice President of Product Marketing

“My prediction for 2017 is that DaaS and Cloud Hosted desktops are finally set to take off in the year ahead. Some people confuse DaaS and Cloud Hosted desktops as being the same thing. They are not. While they do share one common trait, that of being hosted off-premises, they utilize radically different approaches to provisioning desktops which will dictate how much involvement will be required by IT staff.”

“The stars have aligned for DaaS and Cloud-hosted desktops to finally take off in 2017. The market has matured, cloud hosted data has become standard practice to pave the way, and there is healthy competition to drive further innovation. I liken the Cloud-hosted and DaaS market in 2017 like VDI was about six years ago - companies will adopt it for the easy to virtualize areas such as task workers in call centers and then it will continue to grow into more widespread enterprise use cases from there in the years to come.”

Scale Computing - http://bit.ly/2kYuuor

2017: A STRENGTHENING OF CONTINUING TREND

Jason Collier, Chief Evangelist

• Rising Adoption Rates for Hyperconverged Infrastructure

“Hyperconverged Infrastructure will become increasingly popular as an alternative to traditional virtualization architecture composed of separate vendors for storage, servers, and hypervisor. IT shops will increasingly move to shed the complexity of managing components of infrastructure in silos and adopt simpler hyperconverged infrastructure solutions as a way to streamline IT operations. There may likely be a much sharper rise in adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure in the SMB market where the simplicity (requiring less management) can have a bigger budget impact.”

• Increased Commoditization of the Hypervisor

“Virtualization will continue moving further down the path of commoditization with movement toward licensing-free virtualization. As cloud and hyperconverged platforms continue including hypervisor as a feature of an infrastructure solution rather than as premium software product, the desire to pay for hypervisor directly will decrease. Rather than fight for an on-premises, traditional 3-2-1 deployment model, traditional hypervisor vendors will look to create alliances with public cloud providers to maintain their stronghold on the hypervisor market. Beyond 2017, this will eventually lose out to licensing-free virtualization options as the management software and ecosystems around these hypervisors catch up.”

Tegile Systems - http://bit.ly/2krzLkV

STORAGE NO LONGER ONLY ABOUT HARDWARE

Rob Commins, VP of Marketing

• NVMe will hit its tipping point, unleashing the full performance potential of flash storage

“In 2017, expect to see the widespread adoption of NVMe to have major impact on data center speeds, with a direct impact on bottom line. Vendors will increasingly look to differentiate themselves through NVMe adoption.”

• Flash will no longer be just for mission-critical data

“With new advances in flash technology, the storage market is increasing its offerings for businesses with tight IT budgets to utilize flash storage - and not just through hybrid offerings. Technologies like multi-tier flash, which allow companies to have layers of flash for both performance and capacity, will have a dramatic impact on flash adoption by organizations of all sizes.”

• All storage arrays will be connected

“Major advances in real-time analytics and machine learning will be applied to the storage market in 2017, to the benefit of the customer. Storage providers will solidify their analytics offerings, striving to collect millions of different data points from arrays on everything from capacity usage, system health, and configurations.”

Turbonomic - http://bit.ly/2ltoCAq

IT INDUSTRY PREDICTIONS

Yuri Rabover, Co-Founder, SVP of Product Strategy

• Hybrid clouds are here to stay

“With the consolidated capacity and capacity as a service it will become easier to leverage the existing on-prem (owned or leased) resources and use the public cloud based purely on economic but not technology reasons. With partnerships like VMware-AWS or VMware-IBM the boundary between public and private clouds will become fuzzier and customers can decide practically in real time where and when to use available capacity. It will require additional advances in SDN and SDS which are happening as we speak, technologies like NSX are becoming more mature and feature rich.”

• IaaS, CaaS, PaaS will continue to blend

“The boundaries between these services will be becoming fuzzier and fuzzier and will be more and more driven by the application needs rather than pure infrastructure offerings (being it traditional IaaS or container=based offerings). The latest progress in containerizing Openstack illustrates it well.”

• The need in autonomous performance control solutions will be getting stronger

“The scale of the environment and resource service offerings (be it consolidated HCI datacenter capacity or DC/OS on top of it) will make all existing approaches obsolete and force more and more demand to autonomous resource allocation control where consumer of resources will determine how much they need depending on service levels, end user demand etc.”

Veeam Software - http://bit.ly/2k8SuRk

THE YEAR AHEAD: ENTER THE DATA CENTER

Rick Vanover, Director of Technical Product Marketing

• Bragging Rights - All Flash Data Center

“In 2017, I think many organizations will be bragging about the fact that they have achieved an all flash (or solid state) data center in regards to production storage. That's a big accomplishment and investment, and hopefully all types of storage are considered there (backup!).”

• Going "All in" on the Cloud

“Going "all in" on the cloud isn't a gamble - it's a legitimate option today and we're going to see more organizations doing just that in the year ahead and into the future.”

• Blurring Lines of Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds

“A few years ago, the thought of extending data center infrastructure to a hyper-public cloud may have seemed a futile endeavor of connectivity, security and a mix of unknown surprises. The market has so matured of late that I predict 2017 will see significant adoption of hybrid cloud architectures from both the infrastructure and application side. It's already happening and much greater mainstream adoption is on the horizon.”

Zenoss - http://bit.ly/2lvYGVH

THE TOP FOUR ENTERPRISE IT PREDICTIONS FOR 2017

Brian Wilson, Senior VP of Customer Success

• "Fake news" hits enterprise IT monitoring

“Fake news will hit the enterprises with Code Red Alerts because a glut of new technologies are being adopted in large-scale networks. Why? A limited understanding of how to deploy it effectively and how to interpret performance data correctly from all those inter-connected systems. Everyone's first question after a sleepless night is, "Was that a real event?"”

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning heat up

“This year, the story will be about how to leverage big data to turn it into knowledge. So expect to see a wealth of technology following on the heels of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) announcements around artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

• Internet of Things grows up

“Watch for the concepts of IoT to be applied to real benefit in the enterprise, which will translate into improved network availability and reliability, and a better experience for end users.”

• Technology consolidation steps up

“Expect continued large-scale mergers, acquisitions and similar financial deals throughout 2017.”

Zerto - http://bit.ly/2lthXGc

FINDING PEACE OF MIND IN 2017

Jennifer Gill, Director, Global Product Marketing

“Backup and DR will consolidate. Customers will be able to get long term archiving out of their DR solutions, which may render some backup solutions redundant. Many DR solutions, for example, have backup like features, including point in time recovery, which can even be more granular than traditional backup options; recovering from seconds - not hours - ago. If you can recover data from seconds before an attack, for up to 30 days, why would you defer to a 12-hour old backup? Or in worse cases an even older one? In 2017, with SLAs increasing, DR solutions will keep expanding their capabilities further and further into the backup space.”

“With a number of very public wake-up calls in 2016, from the likes of Delta, Yahoo, the California Department of Motor Vehicles and others, these concerns have only been elevated. As a result, in 2017 IT organizations will adopt new IT resilience, business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) tools and strategies at an accelerated rate to both increase peace of mind and ensure they are prepared to have little-to-no downtime should the worst happen.”

“As organizations are looking to be prepared for and able to respond quickly to any disrupter, whether it be a disaster, power outage or new technology, the concept of IT resilience is becoming a major goal, even over SLAs in many cases. This is especially the case with compliance-heavy industries like healthcare and financial services.”

READ 260+ EXPERT PREDICTIONS AT http://bit.ly/2ltoRLE