New and Old Big Data Solutions Predicted to Emerge in 2018

With a new year comes new ideas on how to disrupt the big data industry. From tried and true methods to the introduction of new solutions, several experts are predicting a surge of a combination of both old and new solutions, along with the rise of different roles that will power enterprises through 2018.

1. Managed application services will become the new path to profitability for today’s IaaS providers:  IT organizations are turning to cloud computing to provide more effectively sourced and consumed IT services for their business users and customers alike. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers have proven to be the key enabler to this business trend and are now leveraging their infrastructure expertise to promote and host cost-effective managed application services. Many IaaS companies are building out their own DBaaS or are leaning on companies that offer the necessary building blocks to replicate proven DBaaS technologies. In either scenario, they are enabling their customers to operate that application and their database in the same geographical location and often in the same physical data center. This results in a better end user experience from an optimized application platform. – Allen Holmes, vice president of marketing and platform alliances, ClearDB
2. Enterprises will invest in enterprise knowledge graphs: As companies continue to adopt data lakes, we expect more enterprises to implement enterprise knowledge graphs at even higher rates in the next year. Improvements in natural language processing capabilities will allow users to understand their data in a connected way and gain far more insight from their unstructured data.- Sean Martin, CTO and co-founder of Cambridge Semantics
3. Database as a Service becomes the new black: With the launch of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB in late November, we’ll start to see a shift in the industry toward globally distributed, multi-model and multi-API database platforms. It will continue to be a race between AWS and Microsoft throughout 2018, and organizations’ migrating data from on premises to the cloud will become more mainstream. I predict at least a 50-percent growth rate in the coming year with more and more mission-critical applications being moved to the cloud. - Patrick O’Keeffe, ‎executive director, software engineering at Quest Software
4. Kubernetes will catch fire with Spark: Kubernetes, the open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications, has been a rising star over the past few years. In 2018, we will see its popularity take center stage. Kubernetes implementation by Spark and HDFS users will promote these technologies to work more cohesively together in the new year. In turn, the need for standardizing the IT infrastructure environment is now being fulfilled with Kubernetes. Developers are being enabled with fast access to data across distributed uses of HDFS and soon to be Spark. This will all propel adoption and reduce costs by enabling IT organizations to focus more effort on building and managing applications. - Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata
5. 2018 will be the year of marketing intelligence: It’s no secret that today’s marketers are burdened by a plethora of siloed point solutions. Meanwhile, much buzzed-about advances in data analytics have stakeholders assuming that the marketing department can seamlessly report on the evolving landscape they operate in. Yet, many marketers still remain in the dark. 2018 will be the year that marketing intelligence enables marketers to take control by deploying solutions that leverage AI technology, flexible data modeling capabilities and automated insights to connect and unify, analyze, and act on all their respective marketing data immediately. - Leah Pope, CMO, Datorama
6. Resurrection of technologies: In 2018, we are likely to see the resurrection of technologies like PKI, which have been solely serviced for a long time with the same architecture and concepts. There is interest in the market in new ways to do PKI – rigid lines do not exist anymore and clearer lines of separation are needed to forge barriers of trust. Encryption by default remains a trend, particularly data encryption for stored and utilized data. Key management will remain a big challenge with the significant desire and requirement for enterprises and for large cloud providers. The full deployment of a private blockchain consortium is looking more likely, representing a move beyond proof of concept and towards things actually being transacted as opposed to just a novelty. We are also likely to see value creation move closer to devices in the IoT and then aggregate back to a central repository. - Sol Cates, VP of technical strategy, Thales eSecurity and Jim DeLorenzo, solutions marketing manager, Thales eSecurity
7. New life for SQL: SQL is reborn as many companies realize their Hadoop-based data lakes need traditional database operations, such as in-place record updates and indexes to power applications - Monte Zweben, CEO of Splice Machine
8. Healthcare technologies will morph and expand:  2018 will see a rise in “cross-pollination” where various healthcare technologies rely and/or are integrated with others to provide even better care. AI technologies have the potential to produce an even greater effect within the healthcare industry by reaching patients directly via mobile devices. Developments in computer chip processing speed will result in a situation in which AI functionality is embedded within the devices themselves, profoundly changing the way medical devices work. The impact on the healthcare system will be a change in practice workflows, care delivery, and the integration of devices that make treatment recommendations as opposed to simply providing data for physician consumption. - Waqaas Al-Siddiq, founder and CEO, Biotricity (BTCY)
9. Watch for the rise of the Chief Security Officer: As more enterprises take security seriously, we will see the rise of the Chief Security Officer or Chief Information Security Officer added to the C-suite. - Ankur Laoria, Strategic Solutions Leader at Alfresco
10. Design takes center stage in the enterprise: Despite the plethora of innovative new solutions that have hit the market in the past year, one problem remains inherent in the majority of enterprise software: design. Clunky, hard-to-use tools are increasingly becoming a pain point, and in 2018, companies that fail to prioritize design will begin losing business to a younger cohort of startups that provide enterprise software with a consumer-like experience. - Jon Lee, co-founder and CEO of ProsperWorks