What did BCN readers say last week?

What do you think written on whiteboardOver the past week, we took the opportunity to gauge the opinion of the BCN readership on industry trends and issues, through a number of polls. Here’s what we found out:

Microsoft is unlikely to be successful? 58% say no

For the most part, Microsoft’s lawsuit has been keep out of the headlines. This is unlikely to indicate the whole episode is unimportant to the industry, but maybe more due to the fact the story has been overshadowed by the ongoing saga between Apple and the FBI.

In any case, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against the US government, citing the first and fourth amendment with regard to government agencies using secrecy orders to access its customer’s emails or records. From Microsoft’s perspective, the company should have the right to tell customers the government is accessing their data, aside from in exceptional circumstances. The government disagrees.

While the tech giant has taken it upon itself to fight the good fight alone, BCN readers are a bit more sceptical on the success of the venture. Only 42% believe Microsoft’s lawsuit will be successful, though this is a question which is unlikely to be answered for a substantial period of time. Any decision will be appealed by the despondent party, dragging out any decisions or changes in government practise.

When will containers hit mainstream? 21% say right now

Containers are one of the hottest trends in 2016. We recently ran a buzzword-buster article not only discussing what containers actually are, but more importantly what the value to enterprise actually is. Since then there have been numerous announcement focused around the technology, from Microsoft to Red Hat to Juniper, indicating containers are starting to get some traction.

But how much of the press is a smoke-screen and how much is reality? In short, it’s looking quite positive.

Cloud took a healthy amount of time to be trusted and understood by the mainstream market, and maybe it is this longer adoption time which has accelerated containers as a technology. 21% of BCN readers highlighted that they are currently using the technology in a meaningful way in their business currently, 50% believe it will be in the next 1-2 years, and only 29% said longer than three years.

Who is the best innovator in the cloud industry? 75% still say AWS

Last week AWS launched a host of new features at the AWS Chicago Summit, ranging from new security features, tools which simplify the movement of data around an organizations cloud, platforms for automatically deploying and running apps on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, testing features, as well as authentication services.

Although this is the first major update from AWS in some time, Google and Microsoft have been feverishly bolstering their offerings over the last six months ranging from new hires, to new features and new acquisitions. Industry insiders have even told us at BCN that AWS could be seen to be sitting back to much, offering Google and Microsoft the opportunity to improve their own standing, and make up ground on the number one player in the cloud space.

BCN readers do not agree however. 75% believe AWS is still by far and away the industry leader, 10% believe AWS, Google and Microsoft are all on par, while 15% believe innovation has faltered at AWS, and the rest of the industry is catching up fast.

Is DevOps mainstream? 48% say no

DevOps is another of the buzzwords which has floated over from 2015 into 2016. However, as buzzwords go, few have captured the attention of the industry in the same manner. Such is the prominence of DevOps, it seems although every company is now a DevOps specialist, DevOps expert or DevOps orientated organization.

In fact, this isn’t only vendors who have adopted DevOps, but pretty much every enterprise decision maker has DevOps on the lips also. The main concern here is the definition of DevOps can be seen as lost on certain organizations. Yes, there are practitioners of the methodology, though there are also a host of people who have taken the phrase without fully understanding the implications and the means to implement such an idea.

And it would appear BCN readers also agree with that assumption. Despite DevOps being one of the most used words in the cloud industry, only 52% of our readers believe DevOps has hit the mainstream market.