Technology is pushing markets and
organizations in crazy directions.
What is interesting is how everyone
will react to these forces.
What is going to happen in 2019? This time of year, experts on every subject from cloud
to cliff diving weigh in with their predictions for the year ahead. Some of these material-
ize, others come close but do not quite pan out, then there is a third group that misses
its mark by a mile.
We can assume there will be widespread disruption in 2019, but things are moving so
fast these days, we cannot predict with any confidence which technologies will shake up
fields such as retail, financial services or healthcare.
Here are our 11 predictions for what might happen to the changing market in 2019 and
beyond.
1. Cloud will innovate at the edge
More and more, companies will embrace the notion that innovation needs to take place
on the edge of the enterprise, focused on the end user, not on the internal core opera-
tions of the business. Until now, that has meant things like installing IoT devices in man-
ufacturing plants and launching mobile apps to disrupt the transportation business.
In 2019, expect the cloud to get more into the act. The three hyperscale public cloud
providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) will continue to decentralize
their offerings – pushing more services into offices, plant floors and data centers, help-
ing businesses do more to innovate at the edge. Look for hyperscale solutions to per-
form automation and machine learning away from the main cloud centers, close to the
work in the field.
2. Hybrid cloud use will accelerate
The trend toward hybrid cloud has been advancing for several years now. In 2019, the
public cloud providers will make strong moves to help enterprises stitch together the
equipment they own with the services the hyperscalers provide. Microsoft Azure has
the lead in this market with Azure Stack, but AWS is closing fast, having introduced 13
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