2020 Vision Part One – Chris Evans, Sarah Lean, Greg Knieriemen – EP115

A new year a new set of Tech Interviews podcasts for you to enjoy. In our first two shows of 2020 I chat with five people from across the technology industry to find out what trends, technologies and ideas they expect to see shape the next 12 months in enterprise IT.

In this first episode, I speak with Chris Evans, Sarah Lean and Greg Knieriemen to see how they think 2020 is going to shape up. In our conversations it’s interesting to see a number of subjects that run as common threads, data and cloud is at the core of much of the thinking as most of the contributors feel that both better understanding and a growing maturity of these technologies and what they can deliver will see them continue to dominate as topics throughout the year.

Chris Evans @chrismevans

Chris is a well known and respected industry analyst who can be found hosting the excellent Storage Unpacked podcast as well as some fascinating analysis, particularly on the enterprise storage market, on his website architecting.it. In our chat, Chris certainly expects to see a bit of an industry “squeeze” over the next 12 months in both the data protection market, as well as some of the smaller niche vendors, who will continue to see their market share attacked by the big public cloud vendors. Chris also expects to see Kubernetes continue to develop as enterprises start asking questions about how they ensure their data remains safe within these new containerised environments.

Sarah Lean @TechieLass

Sarah is a cloud advocate at Microsoft and spends her time working with the technical community to understand how cloud can better meet the demands of the modern business. Not surprisingly cloud features strongly in what Sarah expects to see throughout 2020. A big part of her thinking is an increased understanding of cloud and how, as uncertainly and knowledge increases, so the reticence to move to cloud continues to decrease, she also expects to see a continued shift toward focusing on what cloud can deliver rather than the technology itself.

Another key area of growth for 2020 is automation as we increasingly look to simplify day to day tasks as well as better utilise limited IT resources. While talking of better utilisation Sarah also shares a personal goal for 2020 as she tries to work out, with an increased travel schedule, how to remain productive when spending a lot of time in airports!

Greg Knieriermen @Knieriemen

Greg is a wearer of many hats at NetApp, but mainly spends his time advocating NetApp strategy to the wider community, a well known IT community figure, Greg is the co-host of the excellent Go Your Way podcast with Phoebe Goh. Greg also expects to see a continued shift in cloud, but perhaps unlike Sarah, he still sees a little confusion in the market, especially as the major cloud providers via technology such as AWS Outpost and Microsoft AzureStack look to start to bring their technology to the datacentre. Greg also sees the criticality of ensuring much more of our thinking, when it comes to enterprise IT, must change and become more data centric.

He also expects to see the continued development of orchestration and automation in the technology space, as with Sarah he also anticipates this will be driven by companies wanting to ensure they get the very best from their resources.

Finally, Greg goes big, with predicting the death of blockchain!

Some interesting insights from all our guests. Next week in part two, I speak with two more people from the technology industry about what they think 2020 has instore for Enterprise IT.

To get that you can subscribe to the show in all good homes of podcasts, now including Spotify.

If you would like to be a guest or have an idea for the show, then email podcast@techstringy.com

Thanks for listening.