Open Data, Cloud and Blockchain

One trend that will continue to accompany companies in 2019 is blockchain. Through cryptocurrencies, blockchain is closely linked to the financial industry. However, blockchain is a much broader field.

In 2019, blockchain technology will be the driver for new use cases in many industries outside the financial sector. In the food and beverage industry, for example, blockchain can be used to track the delivery of food from the producer to the consumer along the entire supply chain.

Blockchain has the potential to improve the speed of identifying the source and distribution points in a food recall process, for example.

Open data will also pave the way for machine learning. Machine learning (ML) made great progress in 2018. However, ML cannot be successful without access to sufficiently large and diverse amounts of data.

In 2019, we will see how the concept of "open data" as a way to share and aggregate data will be further developed. Projects such as the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) - a development announced by the Linux Foundation - are currently in the starting blocks and encourage companies to share data openly and transparently.

CDLA will be a key enabler for data sharing, which in turn will accelerate the deployment of ML. Some organizations are already sharing data and using this shared data to create an ML model to manage software-defined storage provisioning.

Last, but not least, the public cloud landscape will diversify. Many industry leaders are predicting that the public cloud landscape will diversify faster this year, but the sheer size of the major players is making it difficult for new entrants to find their place in the market.

In addition, the rapid innovation of large US public cloud providers has led to high barriers to market entry. Competition is therefore increasingly focusing on verticals with specific industry regulations, such as streaming companies and the telecommunications industry.

The trend towards niche providers with vertical expertise will continue in 2019, as will the trend towards regional cloud providers. Regardless of this, open source will establish itself as one of the biggest trends in 2019.

Whether machine learning or AI, data centers, high-performance computing, software-defined infrastructure or containers - open source is behind many innovative solutions, and not just in the data center. This is why providers such as SAP also rely on it. 2019 will certainly not be the last year in which we encounter open source.