According to Abby Kearns, executive director and Chip Childers, CTO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, 2019 will be the year we see the cloud market morph into a slightly different shape.
From restructuring within organisations to companies being acquired, 2019 will be the year the cloud market begins to change. This year will be about enriching your company culture, taking the time to figure out what solutions you need, and building a strategic plan for your business, your technology and your people.
Consolidation will continue
Based on 2018’s acquisitions, we predict we’ll see a steady rollout of acquisitions in the next 12-18 months, as major enterprise tech companies rush to get a piece of the latest innovations.
Shuffling in executive leadership at certain large companies is a tell-tale sign that acquisition opportunities will be used to grow business more rapidly. Consolidation around a specific technology is bound to happen, with the market solidifying around that tech.
Multi-platform will be the new normal
A majority of the market believes containers must be the solution to digital transformation, but in 2019, they’ll realise they’re just a tool – not a silver bullet. We’re already seeing that companies are more broadly deploying a combination of technologies like PaaS, containers and platform in tandem, which we published in a report earlier this year.
2019 will be the year enterprises begin to embrace this versatility and see the flexibility, scalability and interoperability in a multi-platform solution.
People and process are more important than technology
In 2019, companies are going to realise the people on their teams matter more than anything. Reskilling their workforces is going to become essential to business success.
Technology is evolving at the same rate as training, so most people with today’s desired skill sets are already employed. Organisations that build continuous learning cycles into their business model and upskill their employees will keep themselves ahead of the curve.
FaaS adoption will continue momentum
FaaS is a serverless technology. It’s already been adopted rapidly as glue code which will continue. However, its function as a productive way to build business applications is only beginning to take off.
We will see the beginnings of an explosion of developer frameworks built on top of serverless systems. This type of tooling makes it easier to work with and build things with FaaS, so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Eyes to the east
Together, we’ve been to China seven separate times this year, and we are astonished at the pace of technological advancement there. With special interest in Artificial Intelligence, China is moving at lightning speed. In 2019, there will be global impact as China’s advancement pushes other regions to hasten their own development.
Scaling up, and quick
We’re seeing the momentum of scale steadily speed up as a result of continued enterprise adoption of cloud technologies. As the technologies mature and are integrated into cloud solutions, enterprises grow more familiar with them, gain trust in their value and increase adoption. It’s a virtuous cycle, which we wrote about in the Foundation’s latest research report, and it’s only going to start spinning faster in 2019.
Culture matters
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your people and your processes are more important than your technology. In our most recent research, we found that nearly 50% of organisations believe culture change is a bigger obstacle than the technology itself.
The shift to digital has to happen within your organisation, and that means with your people. In 2019, companies are going to prioritise a new culture that emphasises agile, integrative, inclusive workflow. It’s just another way the cloud market is restructuring.
