Your 2014 heat map for enterprise technology

I’m glad CES is over. Wearables, hydra-headed PCs, wrap-around TVs, overly intelligent kitchen appliances, and the creepy Sense Mother leave me cold. Yes, 3D printers and drones are cool, but they don’t have to light up Vegas for ’em. If you ask me, CES 2014 had a desperate feel, as it strained to sustain the wave of excitement smartphones and tablets kicked off years ago and inevitably lost.

Forget consumer. If you get excited about inventive tech, enterprise is the place to be right now, with an explosion of new solutions that celebrated analysts have characterized in various ways. Professional visionary Geoffrey Moore, for example, has coined the phrase “systems of engagement” to describe the dynamic enterprise systems customers interact with, versus “systems of record,” aka the boring old enterprise apps such as ERP. The research firm IDC describes ground zero of enterprise innovation as the 3rd Platform, an amalgam of “mobile computing, cloud services, big data and analytics, and social networking.”

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These are useful high-level concepts because they draw a circle around where innovation is happening. But how do they break down in terms of actual new technology? Lately I’ve been creating my own enterprise tech heat map to plug the actual, promising technologies into the high-level models.

The cloud baseline

First, the obvious: The cloud is an underlying assumption for these models. In fact, the entire proposition behind systems of engagement is cloudy because they rely on the ability to scale automatically and to change applications with minimal fuss to meet shifting customer needs. Moreover, critical to the 3rd Platform idea is the notion that business can skirt IT and procure technologies directly — all of which, with the exception of mobile devices, are available in the public cloud.

With cloud as the baseline, here’s my enterprise technology heat map. I’ve divided it between infrastructure technologies, data layer technologies, and app dev and deployment solutions. Be forewarned that the following reflects my personal prejudices about what’s interesting, promising, essential, and fun to talk about.

Infrastructure technologies These are the enabling technologies of the cloud at a foundational level, required to deliver multitenanted services to customers at scale. Infrastructure technologies apply to public cloud service providers as well as to enterprises that run private clouds, but the public cloud providers have been the pioneers.

SDx. On every analyst’s lips is the cute phrase “software-defined everything” (also known as the software-defined data center or software-defined infrastructure). It’s an expansion of the basic SDN (software-defined networking) model, which centralizes the control logic of the network to essentially turn switches into drones. We’ve already performed a similar trick with servers using virtualization, and so-called software-defined storage is on the way. The upshot is that compute, storage, and networking become fungible “resources” abstracted from commodity hardware.

Cloud “operating systems.” Cloud frameworks such as OpenStack — and integrated solutions such as Microsoft’s Cloud OS or VMware’s vCloud — provide the means to orchestrate all those virtualized infrastructure resources and offer them to users on a self-service basis. Such automation is essential for auto-scaling, where a cloud automatically pours on infrastructure resources as user demand for an application increases. Amazon has its own proprietary system, which the private cloud solution Eucalyptus emulates, while HP and Rackspace offer OpenStack public clouds. SoftLayer, acquired by IBM in the summer of 2013, also offers some OpenStack public cloud services, which it plans to ramp up this year.

Configuration management. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt make it much easier to configure and maintain dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. Major cloud providers find them essential to orchestrating their data centers, as do more and more enterprise shops.

Server-side storage caching. Flash storage has become standard equipment on many data center servers. Why not assemble all the flash memory into one large, distributed cache, vastly reducing the percentage of reads and writes that must travel all the way to the SAN? It’s a red-hot idea that PernixData has done a great job of implementing.

Data layer technologies The decades-long dominance of the RDBMS has been broken. A new generation of NoSQL databases has emerged, some of which got their start as back ends for cloud services and have now begun to invade the enterprise. In our hyperconnected cloud era, new database technologies are being complemented by enterprise solutions that process data and update these repositories in real time.

NoSQL. We’ve covered the various flavors of NoSQL databases extensively, with Andrew Oliver’s 2012 classic “Which freaking database should I use?” still attracting readers. The whole idea behind NoSQL is to be able to scale out by simply adding servers to a cluster — and to avoid the RDBMS overhead of laboriously rearchitecting every time you need to change the data model. In 2013, the leading vendor of NoSQL document databases, MongoDB, became the second open source company after Red Hat to be valued at more than $1 billion.

New Hadoop frameworks. The ubiquitous open source solution for storage and analysis of semi-structured data, Hadoop has always had two basic components: HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and the MapReduce job execution layer. The successor to MapReduce arrived in October 2013 with Hadoop 2.0: The whimsically named YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), which enables multiple Hadoop applications to run simultaneously and takes Hadoop beyond batch processing. Also, Cloudera’s Impala, Pivotal’s HAWQ, and Apache Squoop provide new, vital bridges between SQL databases and Hadoop.

Event-stream processing. You could argue that the subtext of CES 2014 was the Internet of things, with wearable computers and household appliances providing all sorts of telemetric data to be digested by enterprises. But the Internet of things is already achieving liftoff in a few industrial sectors — and the key technology to handle that flood of data is event-stream processing. When the VMware spin-off Pivotal launched in April 2013, it did so with a $105 million investment by GE, which is busily embedding millions of sensors in all sorts of industrial products, with Pivotal’s GemFire meant to handle the real-time input. Joining the event processing party last November were Amazon with its Kinesis service and Salesforce with its Salesforce1 integration platform.

Cloud data integration. No database should be an island. A slew of providers has emerged to help IT implement, scale, and manage cloud data integration, including Cordys, Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron, Informatica, Layer 7, MuleSoft, and SnapLogic. As businesses increasingly turn to public cloud solutions, well-planned cloud integration is the only way to avoid slipping into the modern, miserable version of the siloed enterprise.

App dev and deployment solutions Ultimately, the job of IT is to deliver applications to users, but applications are a lot more fluid than they used to be. Today, close collaboration with business and continuous analysis of user behavior dictates frequent revisions throughout the application lifecycle — which benefits greatly from a cloud dev and test infrastructure. In addition, as cloud moves to the center of the computing experience, one idea taking hold is the notion of a core application code base that can be quickly adapted to run across the complete range of Web and mobile platforms.

Platform as a service. Think of PaaS (platform as a service) as an application server in the cloud coupled with integrated management and deployment tools. Up until recently, PaaS has been used primarily by commercial Web and mobile app developers, yet lately an increasing number of enterprises are giving PaaS a spin. Leading public cloud PaaS players include Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Windows Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, Google App Engine, and the Salesforce offerings Force.com and Heroku, not to mention such small independent players such as CloudBees.

Mobile back end as a service. This is similar to PaaS, but specifically targets mobile app developers with additional services. Your typical mobile app coder doesn’t want to worry about building storage, identity management, notifications, and other services from scratch. Mobile-back-end-as-a-service providers such as Parse and StackMob deliver all these services as an integrated cloud offering and help developers manage the entire mobile app lifecycle.

JavaScript on fire. Applications that run in the browser have simply not measured up to native desktop or mobile apps, but new, inventive JavaScript frameworks (such as Famo.us) are closing the gap. Couple an excellent, responsive UI with the ability to access your data anywhere — and even to save state across devices — and why do you need a native app at all? Alternatively, core JavaScript code can be encapsulated in native wrappers to access special features of specific devices.

Data visualization. As InfoWorld’s Andrew Oliver predicts, 2014 will be the year of data. A very interesting set of JavaScript tools is emerging to build applications that enable users to visualize all that data, including D3, InfoViz, Processing.js, and Recline.js.

Cloud IDEs. GitHub and Atlassian provide massive cloud-based repositories and versioning systems for millions of developers around the world. But when it comes to actual coding, the vast majority of developers stick with their local machines. That may be changing with such native cloud IDE offerings as JSFiddle, Icenium, Cloud9, and Codenvy. 

This list of technologies, once again, is not meant to be particularly comprehensive or logically arranged. I find them all fascinating — and I believe they are all important, concrete technology components of the vague industry trends analysts like to bloviate about. IDC, for example, positions its 3rd Platform as a threat to conventional IT, since mobile computing, cloud services, big data and analytics, and social networking can all be procured by business directly without IT’s help. Sure, in the short term — but the downstream effect of the consumerization of IT in large enterprises will be a cloud-scale hairball if IT doesn’t play a role in buying, managing, and integrating that technology.

We’ll see how that struggle plays out soon enough. Meanwhile, for technology enthusiasts who can see past the shiny consumer baubles, today’s burst of inventive enterprise tech provides endless entertainment.

This article, “Your 2014 heat map for enterprise technology,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.