Recently I have been working with my clients in strategic and advisory capacity , some of these inititative require me to jointly develop the future roadmap for my clients. When you work on these projects it doesn’t necessarily stop with Virtualization and Cloud Computing which obviously are top two focus areas and strengths that I have.
During the course of this project I started looking at some of the global trends that we see in these focus areas (Virtualization and Cloud Computing) however I also looked at Big Data , the results were very interesting. The data that I used for this technology trend analysis was based on the results that google has over the past few years of search trends for these technologies.
The trends that I saw and compared may not be directly related to the adoption of the technologies , but it gives a fair idea about the interest in these areas. Lets look at some of the trends below.
Legends used
Virtualization Trends
As you can see above the interest in Virtualization started around 2006 end and gained momentum and peaked in year 2010. In the year 2006 VMware released it’s new Hypervizor VI 3.0 aka ESX 3.0 which had a fundamental shift in the VMware’s core Virtualization product over the earlier ESX 2.0 , this may be a coincidence but we can always try to make sense out of correlated events and here the data indicates and supports the theory that this product was really a market changer and generated a lot of acceptability in the market. Post 2010 we can see a steady decline.
I was also interested in knowing the market segmentation and looked at how this trend mapped to regional interests.Now here it gets quite interesting , this is the final interest rankings you can see above over the five years of data analysis , the interest ratios has changed over the years for example if you see the trend in early years 2005-2007 United States was leading the pack. But current data indicates it’s the Indian Subcontinent with the most interest what does that indicate, again if we want to manipulate this data that means there is a business opportunity and a growth which can be tapped in this market.
Cloud Computing Trends
This data is in the lines of the recent use or overuse of cloud computing words and all the tech companies providing some kind of cloud technology and offering to it’s customer base. XaaS is the best way to describe this fill X with whatever you like I – IT , S – Software , P-Platform , B-Backup and so on. As we can see the whole cloud game started around mid of 2007 and picked up by late 2011 and early 2012 since then it has been on decline but still above the Virtualization trends , I blame the overuse of cloud terminology for this. Also starting end 2011 and early 2012 many companies started to move in the direction of adoption for the cloud technologies. However the decline is alarming with such a rapid pace.
The market segmentation of this have really surprised me , however again we need to consider that this is not a data which is based on the adoption of the technology. Similar to the Virtualization data this has trends which puts the Indian Subcontinent on top , however can we use this to depict the sentiments and customer requirements? In my experience of consulting from last 5 years working in the Indian subcontinent I can relate to this data and can say that there is a definite increase in the interest however if this can translate to the same volume in business have to be seen.
Big Data Trends
Everything is Big about Big Data as of now , this is the hot cake and a technology where the most interest is at this moment. What is remarkable is with in 1 year the trends here have surpassed the Virtualization and Cloud Computing trends. This is also very evident in the recent industry announcements in this segment , few of the notable companies doing lot of work are below.
Pivotal : VMware and EMC’s Spin off
Oracle
IBM
The interest trends are similar to the ones above and again to my surprise it’s the Indian Subcontinent leading the interest levels , however the Big Data movement is still in it’s nascent phase. I believe this is one area which will be lead by the more mature market to start with and then slowly as happens with most of technology areas will spread to emerging markets.
Future Trends
When I looked at some forecasting or future trends it seems that Virtualization trends are going to stable going forward , Cloud Computing will be at decline but with not so much fast pace and Big Data will become Bigger.
Hopefully I can use some of these insights when discussing future data center strategies with my customers and can be helpful for others as well.
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This is an interesting analysis. It clearly displays that it is very difficult to determine what new technology will exist even just a few years in the future. With the current pace of innovation, it is in a company’s best interest to design a road map that includes enough agility to capitalize on hitherto unforeseen technologies when they become available and have proven themselves useful.
Absolutely, CIOs have to focus on having an organization which are robust yet flexible to move forward in embracing a new technology with very less time and disruption to business.