* The rise of integrated telemetry for business analytics:
"The rise of integrated telemetry in industrial equipment, health monitoring devices, mobile payment systems, along with a host of new sensors measuring the world will provide the relevant data fuel for the next wave of business relevant analytics."
* The continuation of disk storage
"The idea of an all-flash datacentre is utter nonsense, and at least 80% of data will continue to reside on disks. Cost matters, and the least expensive SSDs will likely be 10 times more expensive than the least expensive SATA disks through the end of the decade."
* The increased importance of hybrid cloud
"Customers seek a hybrid cloud that does not lock them in to any single provider. SaaS vendors who offer no way to extract data will suffer. PaaS layers that only run in a single cloud will see less usage. Software technologies that can be deployed on premise and in a range of clouds will find favour with customers thinking strategically about their model for IT."
* Software Defined Storage will extend its reach to the cloud
"Software Defined Storage (SDS), with the ability to be deployed on different hardware and supporting rich automation capabilities, will extend its reach into cloud deployments and build a data fabric that spans premise and public clouds. SDS will provide a means for applications to access data uniformly across clouds and simplifies the data management aspects of moving existing applications to the cloud."
* Dockers will be supported on all VM systems
"All major VM orchestration systems now support Dockers and we will see the emergence of a robust ecosystem for data management and other surrounding services in 2015."
* The rise of compute models that behave as a single rack-scale system
"Starting in 2015, the emergence of solid state storage, broader adoption of remote direct memory access (RDMA) network protocols, and new interconnects will drive a compute model where the cores, memory, and IOPs storage will be integrated in a low-latency fabric that will make them behave as a single rack-scale system."