A few Predictions for Data in 2011

It’s been a good few weeks (even longer probably) since I last sat down at my desk and wrote a blog entry. My consultancy work has been a bit too full on, plus Christmas has meant time has just slipped away. Anyway I decided it was time a wrote my predictions for the coming year and seeing my focus is data I thought it would be interesting to predict what might happen in the world of data and data architecture during 2011.

My predictions are as follow:

1/ Data Security will become a mainstream issue.

With the growing number of data security issues over last year such as the whole Wikileaks fiasco, the Stuxnet worm, UK child benefit details and various customer details leaks (such as the two million Honda customers that had their names, login names, email addresses and vehicle identification numbers stolen). As evidence for this the US is building the nations first cyber security headquarters in Utah for $1.5 billion. I expect we will see other countries follow suit.

2/ Yotta will be usurped by Hella.

The largest named data number is 10²⁴ which is called the Yotta. A physic student from the University of California has a facebook campaign going to have a scientifically accepted name for the number 10²⁷ (that is 1 followed by 27 zeroes, or 1000000000000000000000000000). Yotta (10²⁴), which was established in 2001, is currently the largest number followed closely behind by zeta (10²¹), exa (10¹⁸) and peta (10¹⁵).

3/ Hardware and software for managing data will adapt to the data tsunami from the corporate world.
I expect that data warehouse appliance technology will grow in importance with this market making the move from niche offering to mainstream. This will mean that open source appliance offering will become more common place and SAAS options will also become more prevalent.

Hardware vendors will continue to buy up niche storage solutions as the demands of industry push the current technology to within an inch of its live. Combine this with advances in technology such as compression, solid state memory and parallelism. I expect we will see a number of new concepts coming to market in the next 12 months.

4/ Telecom operators will invest heavily in infrastructure.
The telecom industry is going through a huge transformation at present as data traffic grows. It’s a well known fact that Data traffic overtook voice traffic long ago, and data revenues are now starting to take significant share from voice revenues. For example video streaming in the US alone has risen 78% each year since 2005. It has also been estimated that mobile data volumes will double each year until 2014. The current infrastructure is not up to the task which means more money will need to be invested becomes.

5/ Mobile devices will absorb BI applications.
It is highly likely that BI applications (initially dashboards and reports) will start to appear on mobile devices and mobile phones. In future years I expect to see true analytical applications for mobile devices as the BI vendors target this sector in growing numbers.

6/ BI market will continue to grow.
As the global recession starts to recede BI technology will continue as a growth market. The focus will change from cost cutting to how can companies grow revenue and profits.

7/ Demand for Data Experts will grow but will be hampered by available resource.
Over the last decade the demand for data architecture skills has increased. This demand will be held back by the shortage of resources in this area that have the necessary skills. There are many database experts but database knowledge doesn’t make a data architect (see my blog on the role of the data architect). A data architect needs to be able to see the big picture as well as the detail. Without the enterprise view a data architect fails in his/hers fundamental role of growing the value of the organisation data assets.

8/ Data Governance will be a hot topic.
Data governance has already become, and will just continue in this vain, as a hot topic. With bank risk management, data security and many other data related issues becoming board level subjects this is guaranteed to increase in importance.

I'll revisit this list at the end of the year and see how well I score..