Yesterday, we brought you the first series of predictions from Red Hat executives and subject matter experts with their thoughts on what they expect to see happen in the world of tech in 2015, including big data, the business of tech, cloud computing and containers. Today, we’re bringing you predictions on developers and application development, the Internet of Things, mobile, OpenStack, security, and the software-defined datacenter.
 
Enjoy!
 

DEVELOPERS AND APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

Kingmakers beget kings
2015 will be the year of the developer. And the infrastructure leaders who embrace innovation and drive agility in the enterprise will be kingmakers (who enable developers to be kings)!
- Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack
 
Developers at the heart of the open source talent wars
Open source has made software affordable and plentiful. Cloud computing has made hardware cost-effective and plentiful. That leaves developer time and attention as the greatest constraint in an IT organization. In the coming year, customers can expect vendors to compete even more viciously with their own customers for the best talent, and for influence over the most strategically valuable open source projects.
- Gunnar Hellekson, chief strategist, U.S. Public Sector
 
Developers increasingly seek out services and applications within cloud environments.
xPaaS will grow in interest and adoption, with developers wanting more and more core services and applications within their cloud deployment environments. Tying in their front-end development environments to this, so people can develop offline, will also become a bigger requirement.
- Mark Little, vice president, software engineering, Middleware
 
Microservices: a better way to build apps?
2015 will be the year when containers and PaaS become synonymous through microservices and direct-to-developer value.
- Mike Ferris, senior director, Business Architecture
 
CIOs will be asking you about microservices. Instead of developing large monolithic platforms that run on traditional virtualized infrastructure, new workloads will be developed and deployed using microservices which are small, resilient, easy to integrate, and cloud ready.
- David Egts, chief technologist, U.S. Public Sector
 
People will realize that microservices is SOA and that all of the problems we've solved within SOA, such as coordination, contract definitions etc. can be applied here too so we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
- Mark Little, vice president, software engineering, Middleware
 
DevOps acceptance will evolve into tools adoption and standardization
2014 saw organizations accepting DevOps as the standard prescription for their agility problems. The DevOps discussions in 2015 will focus on how Platform-as-a-Service is the right tool to help maximize the benefits of DevOps through standardization and higher order automation.
- Krishnan Subramanian, director, strategy, OpenShift
 
As people move from learning about the DevOps journey and DevOps culture to implementation, there will be a drive towards standardization around DevOps tools and processes.
- William Henry, DevOps Strategy lead
 
Lightweight frameworks on the rise in the enterprise
Banks, healthcare organizations, and other larger enterprise deployment sectors will look seriously at lighter weight frameworks such as Vert.x and Node.js as a replacement for some of their legacy application server environments. For certain types of application and service they need something that doesn't have a steep learning curve.
- Mark Little, vice president, software engineering, Middleware
 

MOBILE

Mobile development will be defined by collaboration and agility
Across the enterprise, we’re currently seeing a greater number and complexity of mobile application projects that businesses must manage. In turn, mobile development must be more agile and more cost-effective in order to sustain demand. In 2015, mobility across the enterprise will tip from single-developer, siloed approaches towards team-based methods as application development becomes a more collaborative effort.
- Cathal McGloin, vice president, Mobile Platforms
 
2015 sees continued mobile platform consolidation.
One or two more significant mobile platform acquisitions will happen, and mobile capabilities will become a more significant battleground in the PaaS wars.
- Mike Piech, general manager, Middleware
 
The rise of mobile continues the decline of the laptop.
The long term decline of the laptop computer will continue as more applications move to the cloud and mobile devices.
- Lee Congdon, vice president and chief information officer, Red Hat
 

OPENSTACK

2015: The year of OpenStack’s great power war (and consolidation)
With the industry consolidating around three or four major OpenStack providers, enterprise customers will be won or lost on the depth of integration offered around their base OpenStack distribution. Customers will want fully tested and integrated solutions but will be wary of lock-in and still value the flexibility of mixing components from different vendors.
- Neil Levine, senior director, product management, Storage and Big Data
 
Consolidation of the open source software-defined networking (SDN) market will happen in 2015. There are now more than half dozen open source SDN projects. 2015 will see the winners separate themselves from losers, and we will see consolidation of the market around preferred solutions for OpenStack and full-stack SDN, with multiple acquisitions of companies in the space, and one project emerging as a clear leader for industry collaboration and OpenStack network virtualization.
- Dave Neary, principal software engineer, Open Source and Standards
 
OpenStack has a big year ahead.
OpenStack appeal will grow beyond IT, academic, and research and will be adopted across multiple verticals i.e. growing from "innovators" to "early adopters" from a classical adoption curve perspective. Customer discussion around OpenStack will evolve to be more solution-focused and move from “why” to “thereof” of OpenStack. NFV will be the proven, “sure shot ROI” use case in production for OpenStack in telcos.
- Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack
 
OpenStack’s enterprise adoption will dramatically increase while more and more customers will demand features for traditional workloads (including disaster recovery, high availability, etc.) as they look to move to OpenStack for their next generation infrastructure platform. OpenStack is now mature and feature rich. It is moving out of the lab and out of POCs into the mainstream for production workloads. OpenStack is now found across verticals such as government, financial services, pharmaceutical, big business, and telecommunications, and we’ll see this momentum continue in 2015.
- Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager, Cloud Management
 
2015 will be the year of reckoning for OpenStack and the OS - becoming one to deliver on the promise of ubiquitous IaaS.
- Mike Ferris, senior director, global technical product marketing
 
The number of nodes managed by OpenStack throughout the world will equal the nodes on which AWS is deployed.
- Nicolas Barcet, director, OpenStack product management
 
Telecommunications and Network providers go OpenStack all the way.
The telecommunication industry will adopt OpenStack as the default platform for NFV in growing production deployments coming out of their POC and pilot phases.
- Werner Knoblich, senior vice president and general manager, EMEA
 
2014 was the year many major telecommunications and network equipment providers concluded that OpenStack is their foundation for agility. 2015 will be the year they realize that "roll your own" is a dead-end, and partner with upstream focused distros
- Tim Burke, vice president, Cloud and Operating System Infrastructure
 
At least one telco will publicly rolled out a core service running on an OpenStack infrastructure. NFV has taken the telco world by storm in the past two years, and the next step will be the deployment to production of a core telco service like vIMS or vEPC and that will happen in 2015.
- Dave Neary, principal software engineer, Open Source and Standards
 

SECURITY

Always a hot topic, but nearly impossible to predict.
Security is always a critical priority. In 2015, that won’t change, with everything from cloud security to security for the Internet of Things as priorities. I expect that headlines will focus on security updates (or the lack of them) from companies, additional regulations and rules, and plenty more getting it wrong. Security is even harder than predicting the future.
 
I expect there will be more major breaches and named incidents than 2014 saw. This trend will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
 
Encryption will also be a hot topic – ranging from old algorithms becoming obsolete to export issues, to default device encryption.
- Josh Bressers, team lead, Red Hat Product Security
 

THE SOFTWARE-DEFINED DATACENTER

Software-defined infrastructure will edge out fabric datacenters for unstructured data sets.
The industry will start to see IT departments manage and govern their datacenter services as one entity through software-based hyper convergence of virtualization, storage, network and compute technologies.
- Irshad Raihan, senior principal marketing manager, Storage and Big Data
 
VMware gives in to competitive pressure and open sources SDDC technology
In response to OpenStack, Linux containers, and open-sourcing moves by Microsoft and other vendors, VMware will open source a major piece of technology for its SDDC.
- Bryan Che, general manager, Cloud Product Strategy
 
Image credit: Artis Rams via CC BY-ND 2.0

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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

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