2014 IT Tech Predictions

In keeping with the popular theme of making predictions of what will be relevant and noteworthy in 2014, I'm publishing my list, which is a stream of conscience.   Given the real-time thought, I hope to provide some which will, at the very least, spur thoughtful conversation and debate.

<pause to take a quick sip from my Old Fashioned>

1. Mobile Security -- MDM will continue to die an all-to-slow death to a solution that never really added a lot of real value to forward thinking organizations.   Ultimately people will realize that putting "shackles" on the device is a losing proposition and solutions that secure data at rest/transit, as well as support strong authentication (Cert-Based-Auth) and "app stores" will start to be more broadly deployed.   Companies like Bluebox and Zimperium will help shape the future of Mobile Security.
2. Social Biz -- "E-Mail is the cockroach of applications" will continue to resonate and attempts to divert attention via applications like Jive and Yammer will drift into irrelevance.   Notifications that go to your Inbox and result in (more) context switches don't help.   I can only hope that Google listens to my suggestions about how to deeply integrate G+ into the Enterprise and not be quite so enamored with chasing Facebook in the Consumer segment.   Making G+ Communities work seamlessly with Google Groups would be a great start.
3. EDW/ETL -- The traditional Enterprise Data Warehouse will become the AS/400 of our time, and, in conjunction with that, the ETL pipeline will continue to evolve to concatenate "best of breed" technologies into a more performant and useful flow.   Incumbent on-premises EDW vendors will need to adapt (and re-write core code base) in order to survive the onslaught of Cloud-based EDW solutions.
4. Platform Defined Security -- As the Googles and Netflixes of the world move to a Networking + Security model that supports an "Elastic or Non-Existent Perimeter", the incumbent security appliance vendors will be overcome by the coming wave of security startups that understand the value in the agent + platform approach.
5. IaaS / PaaS -- Using security as a weapon to not move to IaaS/PaaS solutions will be less effective by those who haven't evolved their skills enough to remain technically relevant.   AWS will continue to widen its lead on the overall market and I hope that Google can realize that the Enterprise is a valuable market in time to not let that lead become completely insurmountable.   At least one reasonably prominent IaaS provider will start struggling in late 2014 due to customer migration.
6. Cloud IdP -- Active Directory and/or LDAP on-premises will start a slow migration to Cloud IdP providers such as OneLogin as the forementioned perimeter becomes more and more elastic and location agnostic.   In conjunction, stronger authentication factors will be adopted by those who truly understand the shortcomings of Password Auth.
7. Death of Monolithic Applications -- SAP, Oracle Financials, etc.... will continue to lose market share against the next wave of SaaS solutions such as Workday that eliminate the 1-N year upgrade cycle, contentious pricing true-up, and a few other things that are why IT schedules are never on-time and over-budget.