Forrester releases 2020 predictions, with recessionary fears and global sociopolitical uncertainty making it to the list

Forrester’s 2020 predictions identify key market dynamics that will impact companies’ growth in the coming year. 2020 will be the year that moves leaders’ attention to adaptability: the ability to understand and anticipate market dynamics — and rapidly exploit opportunities, both big and small.

Factors including heightened values-based consumer activism; the lack of clarity around Brexit; automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics moving deeper into the organization; and recessionary fears due to sociopolitical uncertainty will make 2020 a raucous year, forcing leaders to embrace adaptability.

In 2020, Forrester predicts that consumers will search for deeper meaning. Companies will pay careful attention to authenticity, both in the values they choose to express and how they express them. CMOs will rally around customer value. To establish a successful ecosystem, CMOs will thread the needle between employee experience, customer experience, brand purpose, creative, and technology, imbuing all these crucial areas with customer obsession.

The year ahead will see CIOs focusing on people. Smart CIOs will become a trusted advisor and partner to employee experience and HR teams to help with changing workforce dynamics, including working with new emerging technologies or interacting with robots. Immersive, adaptive IT will take hold. IT will follow the broader organizational future of matrixed, shape-shifting organizations that form and morph to changing priorities.

2020 will see customer experience continuing to bifurcate. Firms that have made the least headway will cut their programs in frustration. Meanwhile, companies that have started realizing the benefits of CX will double-down, simultaneously shoring up their fundamentals and innovating. Advanced firms will double their data strategy budget. 2020 will be a wake-up year for many, as the total cost of getting data wrong will become apparent. Data and AI will get weaponized. In 2020, ransomware incidents will grow as attackers learn that holding data hostage is a quick path to monetization.

Group-targeted experiences will supplant personalization. Marketers will move away from laborious and often-unwanted personalization efforts. Instead, they’ll seek to authentically connect with customers through group-targeted experiences. Automation will reshape the workforce. Automation will change the composition of the job market and raise global economic issues of income distribution and wage stagnation.

Regulation will make and break markets. Regulatory bodies will gain steam — impacting and shaping markets, in a very real way, in 2020. For VCs, profitability will become the new unicorn. In 2020, venture capitalists will increase their scrutiny of startups.

NetApp Keystone program delivers simplified cloud participation for enterprise, both on and off the premises

NetApp announced on Tuesday NetApp Keystone, a program that offers a range of flexible solutions for customers whether they choose to build or buy their cloud infrastructure.

Organizations are digitally transforming to drive competitive advantage. They need to accelerate innovation in today’s real-time world while dealing with the complex reality that data and resources live anywhere and everywhere.

In order to address this complexity, IT environments must transform. While the industry has been focused on addressing these needs from a technology standpoint, the incremental improvements to financial options and to the upgrade process haven’t kept pace, until now.

NetApp Keystone is a program that offers a range of flexible solutions for customers, whether they choose to build or buy their cloud infrastructure, on their premises or off. Keystone offers the agility, pay-per-use economics, dynamic scaling, and operational simplicity that customers need to be able to consume cloud on their own terms.

Keystone features flexibility to mix and match purchases and subscription payment methods; ability to run any NetApp service in any environment—on premises, cloud, and hybrid; freedom to choose how it’s all managed—by NetApp, a partner, or internally; and simplified ownership experience that makes it easier to buy, operate and grow starting with NetApp’s new systems, the A400, FAS8300 and FAS8700.

Keystone is designed to meet the reality of a hybrid multicloud world where IT teams need to have greater choice, flexibility, and freedom to run and pay for their data services however they want.

NetApp aims to simplify the business of data services for customers from every perspective: from how they buy and consume products and services to how they run them in their environments and who services them. 

Along with the new program and simplified customer experience, NetApp announced a number of updates throughout its portfolio, with a range of new product launches, enhancements, and integrations.

The integrated solution with Active IQ and Cloud Insights offer access to NetApp’s exponentially growing data lake of IT infrastructure intelligence for real-time, one-click resolution of issues across an entire hybrid multi-cloud environment. New data services provide security and compliance for various industries, including federal, defense, and critical infrastructure, in addition to enterprise-class protection and tiering of cloud data, regardless of the choice of cloud.

The offering also delivers flash storage systems and solutions and NetApp ONTAP updates offer a range of performance options, simplicity to power enterprise and modern applications. Additionally, the AFF All SAN array delivers resiliency and record-setting performance in the midrange.

Leveraging Kubernetes, NetApp has created a redesigned model to allow true application portability and answer the economic factors and complexity concerns that have begun to plague modern DevOps. Based on NetApp’s own transformation, which connected the dots between three disparate solutions being used internally, it provides the template for anyone to avoid vendor lock-in, lift and shift entire infrastructures, with the flexibility around anywhere workloads live.