Bob,

In my world it has been the arrival and rapid maturing of the API Platform. We have seen a lot of uptake of the platform and work to go with it. It is in interiguing to see how some advanced capabilities around API platform that formed the core of an OTN article now appear to be on the product roadmap. 

It is those solutions that offer the greatest freedom in terms of being an on-premises, hybrid or pure cloud play are making the greatest impression on a day to day view. Whether that is APIs, containerization.or ICS agent technology. This I think is a reflection of the fact that cloud born businesses are typically more technology centric or are less burdened by their legacy and less likely to need partners. However those not cloud born often need an evolutionary path demanding hybrid models.

Microservices lend themselves often to that need - smaller discrete pieces are more movable and we're seeing increasing involvement in applying this kind of paradigm. The challenge I think here is to see through the whitewashing that innevitably happens and at the same time not get caught in absolutes (i.e. a microservice must have its own database server to be purely isolated).

The announcement of the fnproject and the associated Cloud Native Oracle offerings is very exciting, and something that could well take off in the next year.  It ticks all the boxes on the portability, the commitment to OpenSource as well.  The way the project has addressed a number of the challenges that serverless has is intriguiing with what appears to be Node.js style approaches to concurrency and synchronization without the challenges that writing Node.js can bring without using frameworks like Express.

I think chatbots are coming of age, we're starting to see past the novelty use cases into enterprise size application. Have a look at Leon Smiers' capability model of 'bots -- very thought provoking.  Chatbots reflects one dimension of AI becoming more practical and usable (in terms of linguistic processing).  I think we'll see more AI and deep learning over the coming year, but it will still be gradual but with the modelling building being computationally expensive and cloud is making this easier it will pickup in some areas.

regards 

Hi Bob,

in 2017 it was clearly everything around APIs and modern, hybrid architectures, based on new architectural concepts like Microservices. In combination with Container technologies and scalable runtime environments based on Cloud, it is possible to define flexible, future-proven architectures. This is key for enterprises the stay competitive from a long-term perspective, because with this new digital business models and services can be established efficiently.

Where we are on efficiency, modern architectures based on Cloud and Container technologies both are enabling new opportunities to increase operational efficiency. With respect to that Serverless technologies will also become more important and to bring further imporovements in the area of flexibility.

The aforementioned technologies and concepts will further emerge in 2018, becasue those are the foundation for digital transformation.

What I expect to become important in 2018 is Blockchain, because this technology is currently hype, which I last noticed clearly at Oracle Open World. Blockchain has the potential to become a signifant Game-changer in the area of B2B transactions. I am curious to see, if Blockchain will it's promises. A second important topic, I see for 2018 is Artificial Intelligence (AI). With AI, it is possible to build new intelligent, self-learning systems. This will also thrive the adoption of chatbots, which will also become more important to provide new opportunitites for interacting with each other - even in the B2B area.

All in all I think 2017 was and still is very exciting and in 2018 it won't become less interessting.

Regards,

Sven

Hi Bob.

For me during 2017 what really got me going and researching, learning, implementing are the following trends were:

1. Microservices

2. Chatbots

3. DevOps

4. APIs.

For Microservices, it just happened that during 2017 a lot of customers wanted to invest around it. Some with good basis, some others just for fashion. But the fact is that they were in the mix and it was fun to work with them together to what I have always done, which is Service Bus, SOA, and so on

API Management was and will continue to be a favorite topic to work with. Both for research and implementation.  For community events, I used that topic to present in most of the major events I particiapated on.

Chatbots was also a hot topic during 2017, and it become one of my favorite ones. My team is already implementing projects where chatbots are needed, and it has become a very important trend across industries.

For 2018 I think I will be more involved with:

1. Blockchain

2. Serverless

3. Continuing with API Management and  microservices. But now with a different perspective, since I have learned from mistakes in some projects and I feel much more prepared to design architectures where SOA, API Management, Micro services are present all together.

I think in Mexico & LATAM , Blockchain will start to get some momentum so I definitiely see it as an important trend for 2018.

And finally but very importantly, I see a lot of  movement around the serverless initiatives and platforms.

My take is that the this development oriented trend will continue. As I've been mentioning, the role of the developeri has turned more important than ever. Developers have in their hands the ability to create something that could change how the entire world lives and operated. We are talking about those type of relevance levels.

For 2017, technologies rocking my world have been the spread of IOT across different industrial verticals.  The complexity and the divide between OT and IT systems is quite real. IOT can scale with Serverless and Microservice based architectures to round out the end to end architecture. With IOT - one area that is interesting is to see the amount of intelligence available on "Edge" platforms.  A lot of data is expensive to send to the Cloud IOT Platforms and using Machine Learning possibly, or even simply event based architectures and decision logic - can filter out a lot of "noise" in the system.

This Edge architecture spreads beyond IOT - so I'm keeping my focus on how Edge Computing will shape up.

Other than that, Machine Learning, BlockChain are intriguing me.  Oracle's BlockChain Service is a solid path- with its richness of applications - ideal platform to seed and develop a "Minimal Viable Ecosystem".  Oracle is a natural leader for this.