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The 2015 Top Ten IT Pro-Dictions

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The Top Ten IT Pro-Dictions

The SolarWinds High Council of Head Geeks has gathered their sage and eternally savvy wisdom. You would be wise to heed their words

~ Knowstradamus

SolarWinds 2015 Head Geek Predictions

As 2014 comes to a close and 2015 begins, SolarWinds tapped its band of experts – the Head Geeks – to take a look inside their crystal balls and provide a glimpse into IT trends to watch for this year.

To complement the IT predictions from the Head Geeks, we’d like you to share your view of each (50 thwack points will be awarded for replies!). And don’t be afraid to go out on a limb and suggest a “paranoid perspective” for 2015 – Will networks become so complex that they are nearly impossible to manage? Security vulnerabilities so vast that all companies will experience at least one? Will the hybrid cloud transition create more headaches than benefits? Will business end users stage a revolt? Be sure to @mention each geek to continue the conversation with them about their predictions. Here are each of their thwack handles:

Kong Yang - @kong.yang

Lawrence Garvin – @LGarvin

Patrick Hubbard - @patrick.hubbard

Leon Adato - @adatole

Thomas LaRock - @sqlrockstar

Throughout the year, we plan to revisit these predictions and see how are becoming a reality, or instead, how many are turning out to be a completely paranoid fantasy.

  • As networks grow and get more complex, there is always someone else that can step in and make heads or tails of the mess that has been made. Surely agree that if a connection, ether wireless, directly connected, an application or service is slow "The sky is falling!" and it is perceived to down or not functioning. Good read by the way!

  • FormerMember
    FormerMember

    Joshua Biggley, I'm pretty sure you're stalking my brain right now. I find consumer technology to have historically driven the mainstream IT market and it will continue to do so in 2015, but with more speed and precision. That is to say, as Lawrence Garvin mentioned with the iPhone, as the IoT (or Web2.0+) continues to blossom out of infancy, the impact of consumers and their Smart-Everything (Smart Homes, I'm looking at you) will inevitably shape the expectation of data delivery in the work place. It already does. I get calls and emails frequently from my users that claim they can work faster using their phones and question why internet access is so slow when they have 100Mbps connections at their homes. These are honest concerns that we in the IT industry must face daily. Is it fair that we provide comparatively inadequate service and speed? No, but it's the reality for most SMB companies, even the medium ones that are growing into legitimate large businesses in their markets. Trying to keep up with the Jones' (the Jones' being the consumer electronics and internet services markets) can be overwhelming, expensive and deadly to an SMB.

    Again, to reiterate Joshua Biggley, consumers have grown to synonymize the general stability, ease of use and consistent performance of consumer grade electronics, home goods and peripherals with that of corporate IT and expect the same performance and reliability when at work. That's where we come in, the IT pro with Enterprise Monitoring Tools like SolarWinds. Without an ear to the ground and an eye on the sky, we will fail our users.

    The buzz words for 2015 will continue to be: Smart, Connected. Compatible.

  • I definitely agree with Lawrence Garvin about his perspective on application performance.  What I find frustrating as a network engineer is how this seems to clash head-on with the business communities drive towards cutting costs on the actual network.  From moving to cheaper broadband Internet connections to driving towards cutting costs on critical components like routers and such.   You would think with the performance of the applications being more and more critical that they would invest in things like MPLS networks with SLA's to guarantee performance rather than move to the Internet where performance is anything but guaranteed.   Not to mention the lack of visibility into why a cable connection is running slow when all you have is an Ethernet interface to a cable modem (which is pretty much always up and running clean), when compared to seeing errors and such on the interface to your T1's...

    I can definitely see the appeal of the promise of faster speeds like 50Mb or 100Mb at unbelievably low prices, but does it seems as if they forgot the old adage "You get what you pay for" when it comes to WAN connections.

  • I think that the trend towards consumerization of IT is driven by more than just simple economics, although that has certainly accelerated the adoption.  The ubiquity of technology, as you pointed out, has increased the comfort level of all age groups with 'geeky' things, but I think it is the return to centralized computing (from the consumers POV) that has really taken the hardware market by storm.  As complex as technology is (see tablets and phones, for example) they are self-contained packages that require substantially less effort to install, configure and maintain than the PCs of 10 years ago.  Back that up with applications that are available on-demand, the ability to access data almost anywhere, and the collaboration that is fostered by a familiarity with social media and you have the perfect storm for consumer driven IT.

    I have to echo akhasheni's concerns about lack of manageability.  Any enterprise that tried to protect and secure an iPhone was left longing for the Blackberry ecosystem.  Add in BYOD and the uptick in both remote work and independent contractors (freelancers, self-employed, etc.) and you change the paradigm for the management of infrastructure and data.

    I was just thinking about this consumerization of technology the other day and I predict that we will see an industrialization of technology.  The past 3 years have been about trying to get consumers to buy bigger and faster devices -- selling the hardware.  It reminds me of a commercial I heard as a kid "We sell them below cost and make our money on volume!"  While that is enough to make any economist cringe it seems to be the pursuit of so many hardware manufacturers.  If we can only cram more storage, bigger screens, faster CPUs, etc. etc into a smaller package people will buy them.  I see the Internet of Things being first about the standardization of data and interactions.  I want my phone to talk to my TV and my fridge to talk to my tablet, seamlessly.  I don't want to necessarily have to think about the how and why as a consumer, I want to know that it works.  Innovation in this space will be less about faster hardware for the sake of hardware and more about hardware because it actually does what is says it is going to do as reliably as our other industrialized consumer goods -- fridges, stoves, washing machines, furnaces, etc.  Once technology becomes omniscient (and likely omnipotent as well -- yikes!) we'll start to see the real potential behind cloud computing and the IoT.

    (Sorry -- that was way longer than I intended.)

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