Over the course of two days, in addition to insightful conversations and presentations delving into the industry’s current pressing challenges, there was considerable buzz about digital transformation and how it is enabling global enterprises to accelerate business growth.

Blockchain has been a term that people hear but don’t quite understand. The most common myths about blockchain include the assumption that it is private, or that there is only one blockchain, and the idea that blockchain is synonymous with Bitcoin. However, even with the confusion and uncertainty about blockchain, interest in the technology is growing. The obvious reason for that is the fact that it has huge potential for many sectors, including banking, telecom, insurance, and even government.

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In very short order, the term “Blockchain” has lost an incredible amount of meaning. With too many jumping on the bandwagon, the market is inundated with projects and use cases that miss the real potential of the technology. We have to begin removing Blockchain from the conversation and ground ourselves in the motivating principles of the technology itself; whether it is consumer privacy, data ownership, trust or even participation in the global economy, the world is faced with serious problems that this technology could ultimately help us in at least partially solving. But if we do not unpack what is real and what is not, we can lose sight of the potential.

In this presentation, John Bates-who leads data science, machine learning and AI in the Adobe Analytics business unit-will present his 4-prong model of the general areas where Blockchain can have a real impact and the specific use cases where Adobe sees potential. Anything that falls outside of this, should be viewed critically. Real-world use cases will be presented that fit within this framework, to highlight the areas that our industry should and should not explore.

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As more enterprise CIOs and CTOs embrace hybrid multi-cloud deployment strategies, business technology vendors and cloud service providers must continue to evolve their go-to-market approach – in recognition of the prevailing IT infrastructure investment trends.

Vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, grew 47.2 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2018 (3Q18), reaching $16.8 billion, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Cloud IT infrastructure market development

IDC also raised its forecast for total spending (vendor revenue plus channel mark-up) on cloud IT infrastructure in 2018 to $65.2 billion, with year-over-year growth of 37.2 percent.

Quarterly spending on public cloud IT infrastructure has more than doubled in the past two years reaching $12.1 billion in 3Q18 and growing 56.1 percent year-over-year, while spending on private cloud infrastructure grew at half of this rate, 28.3 percent, reaching $4.7 billion.

Since 2013, when IDC started tracking IT infrastructure deployments in different environments, public cloud has represented the majority of spending on cloud IT infrastructure and IDC expects this share will peak at 68.8 percent with spending on public cloud infrastructure growing at an annual rate of 44.7 percent. Spending on private cloud will also grow 23.3 percent year-over-year in 2018.

In 3Q18, for the first time, quarterly vendor revenues from IT infrastructure product sales into cloud environments surpassed revenues from sales into traditional IT environments, accounting for 50.9 percent of the total worldwide IT infrastructure vendor revenues, up from 43.6 percent a year ago.

However, for the full year 2018, spending on cloud IT infrastructure will remain below the 50 percent mark at 47.4 percent. Spending on all three technology segments in cloud IT environments is forecast to deliver double-digit growth in 2018. Compute platforms will be the fastest growing at 59.1 percent, while spending on Ethernet switches and storage platforms will grow 18.5 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively.

The rate of growth for the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment slowed down from the first half of the year to 14.8 percent, which is still exceptional for this market segment. For the full year, worldwide spending on traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure is expected to grow by 12.3 percent as the market goes through a technology refresh cycle, which will wind down by 2019.

By 2022, we expect that traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure will only represent 42.4 percent of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending (down from 52.6 percent in 2018). This share loss and the growing share of cloud environments in overall spending on IT infrastructure is common across all regions.

"The first three quarters of 2018 were exceptional for the IT Infrastructure market across all deployment environments and the increase in IT infrastructure investments by public cloud data centres was especially strong driven by the opening of new data centres and infrastructure refresh in existing data centres," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director at IDC.

All regions grew their cloud IT Infrastructure revenues by double digits in 3Q18. Revenue growth was the fastest in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) (APeJ) at 62.6 percent year-over-year, with China growing at an even higher rate of 88.7 percent. Other regions among the fastest growing in 3Q18 included Japan (48.2 percent), USA (44.2 percent), and Canada (43.4 percent).

Outlook for cloud IT infrastructure investment growth

Long-term, IDC expects spending on cloud IT infrastructure to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.3 percent, reaching $88.6 billion in 2022 and accounting for 57.6 percent of total IT infrastructure spend.

Public cloud data centres will account for 66.3 percent of this amount, growing at a 13.6 percent CAGR. Spending on private cloud infrastructure will grow at a CAGR of 12.6 percent.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Cloud-Native thinking and Serverless Computing are now the norm in financial services, manufacturing, telco, healthcare, transportation, energy, media, entertainment, retail and other consumer industries, as well as the public sector.

The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

DevOpsSUMMIT at CloudEXPO expands the DevOps community, enable a wide sharing of knowledge, and educate delegates and technology providers alike.

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Clare Hopping

Where many organizations get into trouble, however, is that they try to have a broad and deep knowledge in each of these areas. This is a huge blow to an organization’s productivity. By automating or outsourcing some of these pieces, such as databases, infrastructure, and networks, your team can instead focus on development, testing, and deployment. Further, organizations that focus their attention on these areas can eventually move to a test-driven development structure that condenses several long phases into a faster, more efficient process.

This methodology has a name, of course: Continuous delivery. As Jones pointed out at CloudEXPO, continuous delivery allows developers to trim the fat off tasks and gives them more time to focus on the individual parts of the process. But remember-implementing this methodology requires organizations to offload management of databases, infrastructure, and/or networks to trusted vendors.

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The term “digital transformation” (DX) is being used by everyone for just about any company initiative that involves technology, the web, ecommerce, software, or even customer experience. While the term has certainly turned into a buzzword with a lot of hype, the transition to a more connected, digital world is real and comes with real challenges.

In his opening keynote, Four Essentials To Become DX Hero Status Now, Jonathan Hoppe, Co-Founder and CTO of Total Uptime Technologies, shared that beyond the hype, digital transformation initiatives are infusing IT budgets with critical investment for technology. This is shifting the IT organization from a cost center/center of efficiency to one that is strategic for revenue growth. CIOs are working with the new reality of cloud, mobile-first, and digital initiatives across all areas of their businesses. What’s more, top IT talent wants to work on DX initiatives, or will look for opportunities elsewhere.

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Never mind that we might not know what the future holds for cryptocurrencies and how much values will fluctuate or even how the process of mining a coin could cost as much as the value of the coin itself – cryptocurrency mining is a hot industry and shows no signs of slowing down. However, energy consumption to mine cryptocurrency is one of the biggest issues facing this industry. Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to cryptocurrency, it’s basically embedded in the core of “mining.”

In this winner-takes-all game, burning the most electricity increases the chances of winning.

The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index states that the global energy usage of all bitcoin mining already is equivalent to the power uptake of the country of the Czech Republic. Mining equipment for a larger operation can exceed 100 megawatts (MWs) – similar to what a 1 million-square-foot Google or Facebook data center may require.

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Intel is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in the Silicon Valley. It is the world’s second largest and second highest valued semiconductor chip maker based on revenue after being overtaken by Samsung, and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers (PCs). Intel supplies processors for computer system manufacturers such as Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.

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Blockchain has shifted from hype to reality across many industries including Financial Services, Supply Chain, Retail, Healthcare and Government. While traditional tech and crypto organizations are generally male dominated, women have embraced blockchain technology from its inception. This is no more evident than at companies where women occupy many of the blockchain roles and leadership positions. Join this panel to hear three women in blockchain share their experience and their POV on the future of blockchain.

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