The availability of multi-terabyte flash devices will enable flash to compete with high-performance 15K RPM disk drives on a capacity-cost basis, which in turn, see the majority of storage systems delivered in 2016 will contain a percentage of flash to boost response times and reduce the cost of managing storage performance,” said Hu Yoshida, global chief technology officer of Hitachi Data System (HDS).

The rise of the flash devices is one of Yoshida’s predictions on global IT trends for 2016, which he published on his blog recently.

Yoshida also believed, as posted in his blog, that converged solutions will replace reference architectures.

“Instead of providing reference architectures detailing best practices for application enablement, vendors will begin to deliver these best practices as templates implemented through converged solutions. The converged infrastructure offers a more evolved platform for deriving greater cost efficiencies and time savings by allowing IT resources to be managed more cohesively.”

In addition, he also predicts that the move to in-memory databases will gather momentum as faster reporting and analysis deliver a clear competitive advantage in today’s real-time business environment.

Developments such as the consolidation of SAP’s business suite onto the HANA in-memory database with S/4 HANA, and the emergence of converged solutions and cloud service providers, will help simplify IT and facilitate this migration.

Other interesting predictions by Yoshida includes:

1. Data warehouses transition into data lakes
Big data analytics involves the processing of large amounts of heterogeneous data derived from multiple sources and across multiple knowledge domains. Data lakes enable this by bringing together data sources in their original state which can then be analysed by applications that are brought to the data. They must also be able to incorporate existing data warehouses to leverage the investments that have already been made.

2. IT takes control of provisioning analytics platforms
Business leaders will look to IT to make investments in analytics platforms, acknowledging the fact that IT has a better understanding of security, data privacy, integration and the service level requirements of the business. This will reverse the shadow IT trend of business units acquiring their own analytics platforms and tools and creating their own data silos.

3. IT plays leadership role in the 3rd platform
IT will play a more proactive role in leading businesses through the transformation driven by social, mobile, analytics and cloud, collectively known as the 3rd Platform. Contrary to the view that IT no longer plays a dominant role in driving enterprise technology spending, we believe that the compelling value of IT lies in its ability to implement 3rd Platform technologies in accordance with corporate requirements for security, data protection, availability and collaboration. If IT does not step up to this leadership role, the result will be silos of information and duplication of processes that will inhibit business growth.

HDS has also released its Business and Technology Predictions for Asia Pacific in 2016.

According to Adrian De Luca, chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific, enterprises will experience major digital transformation next year as they strive to improve a host of key tech and non-tech functions.

“Digital transformation is fast becoming an organizational issue. It is no longer just CIOs who are championing the need for digital change, but leaders across all business functions. For example, CMOs are finding that traditional ways of marketing are not as effective any more, while CFOs are discovering that consumer and supplier transaction models have shifted. There is now an almost universal understanding within businesses that all functions need to look at how they transform their own practices through digitisation,” said De Luca.

He cited digital transformation, smart cities, cross modal IT, multicloud, and skills shortages as the five key trends that will continue to shape both the IT and business landscapes in Asia Pacific for 2016.