ICT Trends: From being buzzwords to reality

Apart from big data, trends in ICT adoption such as public cloud, NoSQL, and software defined networking are likely to rule this year:

Trend 1: More Public Cloud adoption expected
The Public Cloud market has rapidly evolved in the last 2 years in India with significant traction in online customer facing applications. More adoption towards Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure IaaS are expected in Enterprise and SMB segment from this year. AWS had added 159 features last year into their platform with majority of them targeted towards accelerating enterprise adoption.

According to Zinnov, "Public Cloud comprises of 20-22% of the total cloud computing market in India with current market of $160-192 mn in CY11. Public cloud in India is at a very nascent state and may not have hit the inflection point yet".

Significant growth is expected in India both in Cloud Solutions and Cloud Services job market because of the public cloud penetration in coming years.

Many Indian online businesses have already adopted these public clouds for their customer facing workloads. Scalability, high availability, and flexibility are seen as some of the top drivers with lower cost of operations as the resultant effect in adopting public clouds. We can expect to see more enterprises adopting Public Clouds from this year.

Trend 2: Rise of NoSQL

Architects designing web scale systems have already recognized RDBMS is not the one stop shop for all their data store needs. Lack of flexibility, inability to scale out data, high latency, and costs are some of the data management problems driving architects towards NoSQL. Architects have started mixing NoSQL into their stack with RDBMS for solving scalability problems.

This approach may sound initially complex, but with maturity and ease of deployment of NoSQL solutions, they are becoming reality every day. In addition when NoSQL is combined with MapReduce technology of Hadoop, it can perform complex operations such as filtering and sorting on large data sets leaving traditional data warehouses and business intelligence appliances far behind in terms of performance and price.

 

According to a survey by Evans Data - "NoSQL is being rapidly accepted by corporate enterprise developers in North America with 56% reporting at least some use of the schema-less database and 63% citing plans to use in the next 2 years".

In India large online e-commerce providers have already put NoSQL like MongoDB, Redis, and Cassandra in to their live systems successfully.

Trend 3: Big Data in mainstream

In last few years, Big Data has turned from a concept to mainstream analysis mechanism in many large web companies around the world and in India. Online companies sitting with huge pile of semi/unstructured data have shifted their question from 'what data to store' to 'what we can do with the diverse data we have'.

On the technology front, last few years Hadoop has evolved from just MapReduce programs into variety of sophisticated tools for data analysis. SQL for Hadoop is one area which gained momentum last year with product launches from Apache Drill, Hadapt, Qubole etc.

Important member to join this SQL Hadoop party is Cloudera Impala which already has huge Hadoop installation and partner foot prints across the world. Naturally more traction and production cases are expected in this segment in 2013. Last year Amazon web services launched Red Shift (a MPP for structured data) committing their weight into Big Data in addition to their already existing Elastic MapReduce service.

With the simplification of machine learning techniques, explosion of smart mobile phones, wearable computing becoming a reality, very soon we can expect Big Data to be a major force driving our digital lives in many fronts.

 

Trend 4: Software Defined Networking - Buzz to reality

The explosion of mobile devices, rise of Cloud services and Big Data has made the technology industry to re-examine their traditional network architectures and appliances. Many conventional networks are not ready to handle this explosion and meet the demands of today's enterprises, carriers, providers, and end users.

One solution to this problem, Software Defined Networking, is that it was the big buzz word last year. Basically the idea behind SDN is to bring the same flexibility to networking that virtualization brought to computing. A NW administrator can control traffic, change any network switch's rules and even block specific types of packets from a centralized console using SDN.

This is especially helpful in a Cloud computing multi-tenant architecture because it allows the administrator to use less expensive, commodity switches and administer the traffic effectively. Companies like Juniper Networks, Cisco, and VMware have made huge acquisitions in this space and are ready to help you get down to business in this front.