What is the value of making analyst predictions about the future state of IT every year? To answer this question, you really need to compare the differences between apples and oranges.
For starters, both have skins, and while there’s more than one way to skin an orange, there’s probably no real need to skin an apple in the first place, if you can just bite into it.
You may see such distinctions as meaningless, unless you find yourself in the midst of choosing between an apple and an orange at a scarcely provisioned continental breakfast buffet. So it also goes with the selection of strategies and vendors to fulfill an ever-increasing set of digital transformation requirements from a scarce IT budget.
I have here the citrusy seeds of Intellyx’s eighth installment of our 2022 retrospective and prediction Cortex, a tradition started in 2015 (Jason’s previous firm ZapThink started doing these back when I was a client many years earlier).
Unlike most other pundits, we try not to state obvious observations as predictions, and we score ourselves on last year’s crop of conjectures. Even better, we rotate the authorship of these articles so that no one is in the position of grading the fruits of their own foresight.
With that stated, let’s dig in!
Three Apples: Jason Bloomberg’s Predictions from 2021
Much like the folkloric tree that inspired Sir Issac Newton’s theory of gravity, I have collected three apples that fell on Intellyx President Jason Bloomberg’s head for his 2021 Intellyx prediction set. Let’s see if they had gravitas.
First off, Jason predicted that the US would conduct a dramatic counter-cyberattack against Russia in response to attacks like the SolarWinds hack.
This one didn’t bear fruit, as it became hard to imagine the Biden Administration doing anything dramatic on this front, given the society-eroding continuation of the pandemic and no high-level technology czar installed to prioritize such a cybersecurity initiative. If anything, the rate of exploits and breaches in IT continued apace, crowned in December with the revelation of the widespread log4j vulnerability.
We have, however, seen a lot of preventative effort and innovation from vendors attempting to ‘shift security left’ in the DevOps lifecycle to make it a developer concern. On the infrastructure side, we also saw very encouraging collaboration especially among SecOps and Cloud-Native communities toward sharing exploits and remedies – and wiring zero-trust, least privilege fundamentals into the underpinning componentry of microservices-based applications.
Second, the collapse of the massive Bitcoin-Tether Ponzi scheme was deferred last year – but all the conditions needed for this collapse have intensified tenfold. As it turned out, times of economic uncertainty and a mistrust of ‘institutions’ drove celebrity shills and unsuspecting marks to throw down real money for magic blockchain beans.
The writing is on the roof of LA’s Crypto.com Arena, and bagholders are getting desperate to attract more marks into the tent, advertising the huge upside of HODLing energy-sucking bitcoin, trading NFT monkeys and investing in dogshitcoins to keep the bubble afloat.
With over half of crypto trading activity now circulating through stablecoin shell games, this failure is not a question of if, but when. So much so, that Jason took a couple more Cortexes swiping at it here and here this year, if only to be the last to say ‘I told you so’ when the music stops. Maybe the rug will get pulled this quarter, and I get the last word?
Last, the pandemic and recession ending with a bang instead finished with a series of sputters and pops, as an inability to truly shake Covid and vaccinate the world (much less Americans) has put a damper on economic relief for people and constrained the operations of businesses around the world.
But in terms of IT, this prediction was totally spot on, as enterprises and the IT vendors that support them could no longer afford to cost-cut or wait-and-see their way to developing a digital backbone last year to survive. The hesitance of the first few months of 2021 gave way to an explosion of investment in IT for the rest of the year, and the rate of innovation and consolidation, especially in cloud-native, edge, and AI technologies, shows no signs of slowing down.
Better still, workers in the digital economy made perhaps the greatest gains in 2021, as collaborative lessons, work-from-anywhere capabilities and a serious talent shortage meant many IT employees could afford to job-hop and demand better salaries and flexible working conditions from employers. The future of work is here.
Three Oranges: My Predictions for 2022
First, a great weeding out of vendors. Huge investments in software and outsized valuations in the space will gradually give way to more responsible ways of evaluating the potential success of any vendor. Enterprises will become wiser about TCO and ROI metrics and refine their selection criteria to fit their desired architectural goals.
Vendors large and small, with strategic vision and genuine innovation that can demonstrate value for paying customers will be poised to accelerate and retain unicorn status, while the fortunes of many runners-up and legacy vendors in each category will decline, resulting in layoffs, fire sales and surprise dissolutions.
This does not mean startup activity will decrease by any means in 2022. Volatile conditions and technology realignments are the most fertile ground for sprouting unique approaches for improving agility at scale to meet customer needs.
Observability will branch out into many forms. This solution category has consumed aspects of software performance, security, testing, development, issue resolution, planning – and all of the data and infrastructure supporting it.
With so many alternatives, observability will need to split into many forms – not just for SREs obsessed with production, but in different types of shift-left and shift-right observability challenges for the movement and security of data feeding ITOps, network analytics and AI learning tools, as well as assisting developers with many aspects of legacy modernization and migration.
Every organization will need observability. The question will become, what specific kind of observability is needed for the work at hand?
Supply chain will start to enter the IT mainstream discussion. I came to enterprise IT through supply chain management (SCM) pre-Y2K, and coordinating the many moving parts of SCM has always been a dark art, even for the people running the cogs of supply chains — manufacturers, logistics providers, warehouses and retailers.
2021 taught the world that supply chains impact just about everything we buy or do at a personal level. In 2022, responsible orgs will include software and hardware supply chain considerations in every architectural aspect of planning and provisioning digital capabilities. Even though software is still a bunch of bytes, potentially moving through ephemeral cloud infrastructure, every application and the partners that support it forms a brittle supply chain that leaders will struggle to strengthen and make more supple.
Real global supply chains will also become the #1 growth market for edge computing and IoT. Many new combinations of device and sensor data will flow into tracking, analytics, AI-based forecasting, production planning and multi-party networks to modernize legacy SCM hub-and-spoke networks and ERP systems (many of which, like their creators, really haven’t changed much since the 1990s).
The Intellyx Take
All things being equal, I happen to think I could throw an apple farther than an orange, but I’m still not quite sure about that and won’t get to test it out until later this year.
I could have easily predicted that cloud adoption would grow, and that the use of low-code automation would increase, or that we’d experience another massive cybersecurity breach – but that would be like opening a fruit stand that sells store-bought fruit, in front of the store.
The only thing that will remain constant this year is change, and the determining factor of an organization’s survival will be its reaction speed for applying new technology to meet the chaos that change creates.
To make it in 2022, organizations must value people more than ever to negotiate change, and listen to the experiences of employees, partners and customers – above the preferences of their own executives and shareholders. That’s a sweet lining for most of our readers.
Yes, success is still there for the picking.
©2022 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Intellyx Cloud-Native Computing Poster and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. Image credit: Michael Johnson, wikimedia commons, CC2.0 license.
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