Predictions for 2014

It’s the new year and the opportunity for every blowhard to blindly toss their darts on the wall of IDC and Gartner data and proclaim the next cash cow. And with that in mind, the future is robots and drones which through a innocent mistake by the summer intern flip the bit from delivery to repossession and Amazon ends up with everything you’ve ever bought for them. And they’ll need it – in 2014 Amazon gets hacked beyond belief and needs to fortify it’s headquarters to keep angry customers who lost their life savings in the identity theft. Google comes out with a car that can drive itself around the obstacles placed in the road by Bezos & Co and Microsoft naturally responds by adding smartphone functionality to a NERF foam rocket launcher, marking it’s most significant innovative contribution to the field of security since retiring ISA.

I don’t know about you, but that’s sort of how I feel when journalists that don’t work in the IT industry take guesses about the industry. Kind of how like I’m a world class chef because I’ve seen Mario Batali cook a trout on Food TV.

That said, here is how I’m spending my money.

Unemployed on Easy St

The bottom of the IT world has fallen out and it will continue to erode. There can only be so many Verizon employees out there and IT ain’t hiring: If you’re only capable of answering simple technology questions and following a simple cookie cutter process this is going to be a rough year.

The reality of our industry is that everything that is easy is getting automated and everything that is automated and measurable will be controlled by the vendor in order to eliminate third party middleware from becoming a part of the picture.

It’s not just mobile, it’s the variety

So many people predicted that BYOD and MDM were going to be the biggest change and indeed the solutions arrived with a massive thud of indifference. Truth is that everyone is concerned about the mobile and sees it as a major game changer in corporate IT – but the reality that nobody wants to spend a lot of money for something that doesn’t manage 100% of the end-to-end solution is the rude awakening to the dream of controlling everything and anything – especially when the corporation doesn’t actually own it.

Going forward, the challenge will not be “managing” these devices but pointing out the issues and addressing them before they become a problem. This means having data to back up issues related to how the work gets done and reacting to changes quickly. A year ago it was all about getting a handle on iOS or Android, now it’s a matter of a lot numberswiki.com

more than just two mobile operating systems.

It’s not maintenance, it’s project

Getting paid just because stuff works is no longer a viable future business model when stuff doesn’t actually break a lot. If you’re in the camp of “But my clients still have XP, it will take a long time for…” I hope you’re actually investing those profits to be ready for the future that not only doesn’t have Windows XP but has a built in video help system that came for free. Would you put any of your techs in front of a webcam and stream them to your users?

The area where IT talent will continue to be massively profitable is projects with organizations that made massive investments in IT and need to keep it up. There are still ads for AS/400 admins out there.

I like a lot of what Vlad says but I don’t agree with all of it

Translation: “I only like the opinions that fit my own biased view but the rest of it is just crazy.”

The way we look at the rest of this decade, as far as where we can play, is to focus on the backend services that will help consolidate the massive surge in different services people rely on. Email remains the single sign on protocol of the Internet and also the single point of transaction records or backups (everything relevant to what you do on Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc is also emailed to you) – not by accident either, all these services need to find a way to keep dragging you back to their sites – and if you aren’t typing in the URL or launching the app then they need to prompt you to do it: Facebook wants you to wish someone a happy birthday, LinkedIn wants you to congratulate someone on their new job, Pinterest thinks you’d like to turn an empty roll of toilet paper into a cable extension organizer and the former Prince of Nigeria still needs your help to get his billions of dollars out of his war torn country.

We are aligning our business (ExchangeDefender) with our partners and taking over mindless tasks related to email migration projects. We are extending the service management to include these new communication protocols. In a way, we’re using our size to grow the portion of the business that doesn’t have very exciting long term prospects in order to have a larger deployment base for the service that helps manage multiple communication and notification networks.

Truth is I can’t build a Nokia and I’m not brave enough to launch a drone: But I know that business gets done through talking and so long as I can make sure people can talk (and can keep the content of their conversation secure) I’ll be alright. All the gadgets, fads and hype in between is just noise and we don’t get paid for that.