State of the Industry 2019
Stratus Technologies

Jason Andersen, VP of Business Line Management at Stratus Technologies, spoke with Pumps & Systems magazine for the January 2019 state of the industry issue.

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Hardware will get bigger as it gets more powerful

There is a notion that edge computing devices are going to keep getting smaller in a capacity sense due to offloading to clouds. In 2019, these edge gateway devices are actually going to get more powerful and will need to get larger in order to have more capacity to run virtualization or containers to support more apps that will in turn consume more data. Especially at the far edge, there is a drive for ‘smaller’ but we’re going to see this trend reverse over time, starting in the next year.

The IT-OT divide will become a priority

The industry has been on the upward swing of the hype cycle when it comes to new technologies in cloud and edge computing. 2019 will be the year that business leaders get the bill for all of the IoT and IIoT projects that they’ve been piloting. That’s potentially nerve wracking, especially for those on the operational technology (OT) side. Unlike IT, which over the past decade has largely transitioned towards operational expense and pay as you go models, OT is still driven by capex. Additionally, while IT has realized that cloud might not have delivered on the savings expected, they agree that the benefits of speed and agility outweigh the costs. On the flip side, OT teams have yet to figure this out. To overcome this in the year ahead, IT and OT need to work together on planning as well as implementation as new technologies in cloud, edge and cybersecurity are coming into the forefront.