016: 5 trends in 2014

Hey Now! Following a crazy full house show for our Christmas Quiz we bring you yet again 5 golden hosts for this 2014 recap edition. We look back at the bigger trends of last year in a full hour show.

TREND 1: decoupling software from hardware

IBM spins off MicroElectronics to GlobalFoundries and pays $1,5 billion for that move. Shortly after they spin off their server business to Lenovo for $2,3billion. Is there a bigger trend going on here? How can Cisco, HP or DELL remain relevant in a world where SuperMicro, Lenovo, Quanta, ... eat up all the margin that is left?

TREND 2: the adoption of FLASH

In 2014 we can safely say that all storage vendors are offering an all-flash solution, whether it is through acquisition, an evolution of a startup product or bolted on a 20yr old filesystem. The result is that we finally are able to decouple the cost of performance from the cost of capacity.

TREND 3: 2014 was the year of the Hyperconverged solution

We see VMware EVO:RAIL here as a big topic of discussion. It's a validation of a market shift but we do have some second thoughts on the specifics of the VMware solution; it's not shipping yet, it's built on a gen1 storage product and from what we have heard, it's going to be quite pricy. Can Nutanix, SimpliVity and ScaleComputing monetize their head-start? Do new players even stand a chance?

TREND 4: will the real new Microsoft please stand up

Microsoft is changing. Aidan Finn (@Joe_Elway), a well respected Microsoft blogger, gave us some stuff to think about. According to him a couple of changes that emerged this year were Cloud First, Windows not first and the comeback of feedback. 

TREND 5: Open Source takes over the Datacenter

We have talked about OpenStack and containers a couple of times on this podcast and we can only expect this to come back even more next year! These are early stage technologies but with a lot of potential to change the way we think about the enterprise datacenter. (OpenStack analytics link: Stackalytics.com)