As you’re planning what you are going to do this year and what you are going to invest in – review my last two posts on disruptive technologies
Disruptive technologies and investments & Disruptive investing – comparisons and trends
Then go read the Emerging Technology Roadmap, 2013–2016. This roadmap is derived from over 400 IT Professionals from 84 companies evaluating the adoption of 73 infrastructure and operations technologies and provides some interesting insights into where corporate IT spend is going.
After breezing through the first two posts and reading the roadmap, there are a few key things that become blatantly obvious.
Software Defined Networking will get more and more important and investments in this space will start to deploy closer to 2015/2016. If you are going to make an investment in this space, expect this kind of timeframe for a payoff. Software defined storage is in the same boat.
There will be a lot of cloud technologies deployed in the 2014/2015 timeframe. This is likely where people will see a lot of noise as well which makes investment more difficulty but also offers more opportunity. Looking at the first two posts, there are a number of cloud technologies that are mentioned. Comparing against the roadmap provides some insight into which of those are more likely to be deployed. Namely specific workloads will move to the cloud faster (e.g. productivity workloads, HR workloads, Sales workloads, heavy compute/analytics workloads)