Machine-managed cloud, Amazon-run contact centres and bye-bye servers: the IT market in 2019
Cloud has long been establishing itself as the go-to IT infrastructure for all sorts of businesses and use cases. First it was about private cloud, and now we’re seeing the rise of public cloud as the vehicle for the world’s enterprise. So what’s the next move? What can business leaders expect to deal with in 2019?
Machine-managed cloud
Firstly, machine learning will manage your cloud for you. There’s a huge swing in the cloud market towards tools that allow you to effectively monitor and govern your cloud environment. Machine learning algorithms will soon be predicting the behaviour of your environment. Rather than waiting for a server to fail, companies will have trend analysis built in to create a profile of the behaviour of their solutions to see what’s going wrong. It will be able to predict peaks in usage, performance degradation, and see failures coming up. As a result, 2019 will see the industry moving towards self-healing cloud.
Contact centres move to the cloud
Movements in the contact centre market this year mean that in 2019, we will see contact centres move into the cloud. Entire omnichannel customer contact operations will begin to move into the cloud, leaving nothing in the office or the data centre. Most other business services have been feeling the benefits of the cloud’s flexibility and scalability for years, and now we’re going to see contact operations following suit. Currently many businesses can’t outsource to the cloud: they can only outsource to another provider or private cloud. But very soon you’ll be able to architect your contact centre as a SaaS platform.
For example, Amazon is in the process of rolling out its ‘pay per call minute’ contact centre software in the UK, which will make the move to cloud simpler and quicker. People don’t want multi-million pound software on multi-million pound hardware any more – they want to be able to integrate contact centre and CRM in one place, and scale at will. What’s more, as machine learning becomes more common, it will be far easier to incorporate new capabilities into a SaaS platform than on-premise.
Serverless future
One of the biggest shake ups we will see next year is the further decline of servers – at least for the consumer of services. New systems and solutions built in the cloud are being designed to run without servers. The advantages are so great that it is becoming the de-facto infrastructure pattern. We will see much greater use of serverless design patterns in 2019. The major cloud providers all offer serverless runtimes. Of course, SaaS products are serverless to the consumer, but it is the ability to connect the SaaS and PaaS together without having to provision physical or virtual servers that is really liberating idea.
The power of the serverless pattern is that it quickly and easily allows existing services to be connected, providing new solutions or changes to existing software. These design patterns are becoming the go-to architecture for new systems due to their value, speed and flexibility. There’s approximately a 200% increase in use of this technology per quarter in the last year.
How will all of this be possible in 2019? We’ve arrived at a period where businesses will return to core competences. Businesses don’t want to be IT companies - they want to focus on what makes them money. That’s why managed service providers are going to become even more essential in 2019 – they let people get back to being what they really are. Senior managers and chief executives are walking into their board meetings and talking about IT risk and spend rather than the core business – that needs to change, and managed service will make it happen.
Stephen Long, EVP Enterprise at KCOM
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