Enterprise software’s days are numbered, and if you do not adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), your data centre will be useless.
Those are the assertions of Gartner Research vice president Milind Govekar, presenting at Gartner’s annual conference for IT infrastructure operations professionals recently in Las Vegas.
Govekar said as soon as 2019, at least a third of the largest software vendors will have transitioned their products from cloud-first to cloud-only. Although he did not mention it by name, one would have to think Microsoft is in that category as it is already cloud-first with its enterprise applications. Office 365 already outsells the packaged Office 2016, so one can expect a de-emphasis of the client product in the coming years.
SaaS provider win
However, this move will be more of a win for the SaaS providers than customers. SaaS prices have risen about 8% in the last three years, Govekar said, who also warned that SaaS vendors such as Salesforce, Oracle and SAP are engaging in a “lock-in strategy” not unlike what enterprise software vendors used to do, integrating their products so deeply that moving or switching is prohibitively difficult.
And when you are dependent on software, you do not own but rent as a service, it becomes a little like the cable monopoly where there is little anyone can do to prevent them from raising prices on a regular basis.
That is part of the reason why Gartner predicts a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.2% for SaaS, while IT spending will rise only 3%. But much of that rise comes from the overall market shift to on-demand apps rather than on-premises.
There are some workloads that will never go to the cloud, though. Anything data-intensive is not moving to the cloud because you will get killed on the bill. So, analytics, business intelligence (BI), large databases, big data, and similar tasks are not moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) any time soon.
DC must adopt AI, ML or else…
But for those who keep their data centre, they better adopt AI and ML or it will be useless, Govekar predicts. By 2020, 30% of data centres that fail to apply AI and machine learning effectively in support of enterprise business will cease to be operationally and economically viable.
He said a programmable infrastructure, one where methods and tooling established in software development are applied to the management of IT infrastructure, is the path for data centres—to adopt concepts and practices such as automation, versioning, APIs, immutability and agile techniques.
AI and ML provide the power to compute larger amounts of data, speed for faster decision making, efficiency, and the intelligence to act on the data autonomously.
Of course, all such predictions are fraught with risk. Like the prediction the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996. Stewart Alsop may never live that one down.
IDG News Service
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers