Bye Bye 2018 and time to embrace 2019 – the year of Innovation, Transformation and Relevance! With 2018, the days of relying on proprietary technologies are long gone. Open standards have now become a part of strategy to implement technology innovations. And those that have not done so yet, will soon follow as they seek to find relevance in an increasingly digital world. Given how it has become the driving force behind much of the digital innovations today, I would like to share some trends that could impact business houses in 2019 in a significant way:

Trend 1: Market Collaboration and Open Source Investments

With deals such as Microsoft and Github or IBM and Red Hat, this Open Source-driven environment will see organisations in a position to take the best aspects of these businesses and come up with something truly great.
Elastic went Public as one of the most successful technology IPOs of the year. Hortonworks and Cloudera announced merger into single entity promising next generation data platform. Following such strategic alignments and investments this year, 2019 will see open source investments starting to pay even more dividends. Such investments and acquisitions have proved one thing – open source holds significant value to enterprise businesses. I believe there is room for such things to continue in 2019, with Docker, NGINX, SUSE ripe for the next big jump.

Trend 2: DevOps and Cloud

Open-source projects such as OpenStack and Kubernetes are advancing technology transformations. Organisations are looking to make their datacentres software defined. Containers, Automation and DevOps tools are helping organisational evolution from on premises to cloud. Projects are logically moving up the stack, from Linux to virtualization to Kubernetes and in the cloud. Organisations are also looking at DevOps as a cultural change and striving to achieve this. It will continue this year too.

Trend 3: Functions as a Service (FaaS)

With IaaS, PaaS and SaaS becoming standard and well accepted models, the focus is now shifting towards Functions as a Service or FaaS. The underlying technology, software, platforms are irrelevant, but focus is on getting the work done through Functions. AWS Lambda is a great example of this concept. The user-developed functions are designed to start quickly and run multiple instances, if necessary. FaaS is referred to as a “serverless architecture” – the server is invisible. It gives you an upgrade path, despite being completely decoupled from any particular cloud provider’s platform. With FaaS, one can put functions into Docker containers so that those can be run as standard microservices outside of the Open FaaS platforms.

Trend 4: IOT, AI and Blockchain

IOT, AI and Blockchain initiatives will continue to startle the industry with their transformative powers. While there is an industry-wide acknowledgement of the revolutionary effects these technologies can have on businesses, organisations are still grappling with how to capitalize on each of the technologies. But, I strongly believe that instead of looking at these three things in isolation, it’s time to look at all of them together and maximise its potential to create the greatest impact. While IOT helps to bring colossal data together, AI helps make sense out of that data and in capturing actionable insights. Blockchain, at the same time, enables trusted data brokering across industries so that the data is leveraged to unleash business values. This year, we will see more and more of such cases where all three – IOT, AI and Blockchain are being deployed in unison. Stay ready to witness some phenomenal success stories emerging towards the conclusion of 2019.
By and large, this year will be a thrilling journey for the open source industry and in general for the technology industry. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Happy New Year!