collective unconscious of the smarter planet

More from O’Grady.

ARM Will Emerge as a Server Player

Whether they will ultimately emerge as a credible mainstream alternative remains to be seen, but ARM is indeed emerging as a server player. Though virtually all of them discuss it privately, HP (via Calexda) this year became the first major systems player to publicly detail plans for ARM servers – perhaps banking on the fact that the upcoming A15 processor is more server friendly,

Intel is predictably skeptical of ARM’s viability in its core markets, with CEO Paul Otellini bluntly dismissive: “It ain’t gonna work.” And while it certainly hasn’t proven to work thus far, and there are real architectural and software issues to address, the power profile continues to pique the interest of server manufacturers and customers alike. Even marginal power savings mean real dollars at scale.

I count this as a hit…

The NoSQL Marketplace Will Experience Consolidation

The merger of CouchOne and Membase into CouchBase in February provided some evidence that the long anticipated wave of consolidation in this space was beginning, but the balance of the year provided little evidence to support this aside from the acceleration of a few individual players such as MongoDB [coverage]. I remain convinced that the marketplace will be unable to sustain the current volume of would be commercial entities, but from our conversations with both those in a position to potentially impact consolidation and those interested in partnering with various NoSQL players, it is clear that consolidation will depend on clearer winners and losers to proceed. This should occur in 2012.

I’ll count this as a push in light of the CouchBase merger which subtracted one player but otherwise saw very few exits.

NoSQL Will Look More Like Pro-SQL

The implicit rejection of the Structured Query Language in the NoSQL term is ironic in light of the fact that a variety of projects are now adding similar features. Continuing in the proud tradition of Hive and Pig, which provide query language interfaces to Hadoop, DataStax announced CQL in June while CouchBase and SQLite announced UnQL in July [coverage].

Whether we’ll see a unified interface or a variety of engine-specific implementations as Alex Popescu would prefer remains to be seen, but query languages will be coming to the majority of NoSQL stores one way or another.

I count this as a hit.

Open Source of Non-Strategic Infrastructure Assets Will Increase

From Twitter open sourcing the Storm assets it acquired via the BackType transaction to the New York Stock Exchange’s donation of OpenMAMA to the Linux Foundation, it is increasingly clear even to traditional parties that the release of non-strategic code as open source has multiple benefits. GitHub’s Tom Preston-Werner’s list of same is difficult to improve upon:

• “Open sourcing code is great advertising for you and your company.”
• “If your code is popular enough…you will have created a force multiplier that helps you get more work done faster and cheaper. “
• “When you open source useful code, you attract talent.”
• “If you’re hiring, the best technical interview possible is the one you don’t have to do because the candidate is already kicking ass on one of your open source projects.”
• “Dedication to open source code is an amazingly effective way to retain that talent.”
• “[Assuming code will be open sourced] leads to effortless modularization.”
• “By getting code out in the public we can drastically reduce duplication of effort.”
• “It’s the right thing to do.”

It may or may not be beneficial to open source core strategic assets, as VMware did with Cloud Foundry, but it is increasingly hard to justify protecting those that are purely tactical in nature. The benefits in many if not most cases will outweigh the costs, which is why we’re seeing an increase in contributions to open source projects.

The data from the annual Eclipse surveys is one example of this. If we examine the percentage of organizations that contribute back to open source versus those that do not from 2007 to 2011, it is clear that comfort levels with open source generally are rising.

I count this as a hit.