From the failure of big data projects to the rise of wifi as a human right, the next year will see massive shifts in how we harness technology. JJ Milner, Founder and Managing Director for Global Micro Solutions, shares his projections regarding which technology stories will dominate the headlines in 2015.
The end of the storage price wars
You can expect to see vendors offering unlimited capacity at a flat rate, and instead, start charging for different features on top of the storage. Companies like Box are offering this already – turning their price point to whether users enable certain features or not.
Customers will demand Service Level Agreement (SLAs) for mobile
With increases in mobile data congestion, customers will begin to ask for SLAs on the quality of mobile signals there is little chance that SLAs will be delivered upon, because we don’t have the technology to support it as yet. But it will be an indication that service providers need to have greater accountability to the needs of the mobile-enabled worker. Architecture needs to change and apps need to be rewritten because people will start demanding this in the same way as they have about bandwidth.
Big data, big disappointments –Big data itself is not earth shattering. It’s about Big data analytics.
I’m not putting down the notion of big data mining in its entirety, but we will begin to see the emergence of the first disappointing big data projects. Big data washing is going to get exposed. I think there is great value to be derived from using big data to answer questions and produce statistics, but the generalist approach to mining raw data is throwing horsepower at the problem instead of maths and science.
The application integration specialisation will rise
Typical SMEs use five to six core applications. Bigger companies can use upwards of 30. So now there is a demand for a service that will help all these applications talk to each other. That specialisation will be a growing and extremely sought-after function and indeed profession.
Encryption will be the next thing to be offered “as a service”
Vendors are under pressure to add encryption layers to their services. iCloud, for instance, has two-factor authentication, but the data still isn’t encrypted, and we all saw where that got their celebrity users in 2014. Of course, vendors don’t want to make their services look vulnerable, so Encryption as a Service will probably be sold as a “chain of custody” or “compliance” solution.
An increase in service provider consolidation
We’ll see a lot more service provider consolidation in 2015. In 2013, I spoke about smaller providers feeling the crunch, but in fact, bigger providers are feeling it just as much. We’re already seeing this in Neotel and Vodacom, Dimension Data and MWeb Business, and Vox being up for sale.
Wifi declared a human right?
Internet access has already been declared a ‘basic human right’, and it seems that wifi will soon follow. The Tshwane municipality is already talking about this kind of eGovernment roll-out, but South Africa is still way behind the developed world in terms of wifi access. We’ll be talking about this a lot in 2015.
International data privacy wars
Countries will start competing for custom based on their data privacy legislation. In the same way as Switzerland has become a high-end banking destination because of their discretion, other countries will establish themselves as data havens.
Dramatic changes in tech tax
Some countries will start to offer tech companies incentives like demanding only 10% of turnover in taxes, and make greater anti-avoidance provisions. Companies that offer these kinds of tax incentives become favourable locations for tech R&D, so it’s a worthwhile strategy.
Channel conflict in the cloud
The diversifying of the big cloud players means that we’ll start to see market conflict. Amazon is already competing with Netflix and Dropbox as services start to become more agnostic. This means it will become possible to move workloads more aggressively between the providers.
Small providers not in it for the money
Some small cloud providers will stick it out in the industry, but they will become more like lifestyle businesses, with management enjoying being self-employed. These businesses will not be avenues to huge financial success and certainly won’t deliver more money to their founders than if they were employed.
JJ Milner, Founder and MD of Global Micro Solutions
