Amazon Inc, the worlds largest online retailer, is being known these days as more of a technology company, and rightly so.

Technology is at the core of whatever Amazon does from algorithms that forecast demand and place orders from brands, and robots that sort and pack items in warehouses to drones that will soon drop packages off at homes.

At its new Go Stores, for instance, advances in computer vision have made it possible to identify the people walking in and what products they pick up, helping add them to their online shopping carts.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the worlds richest man, is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, like next-day or same-day shipping and cashier-less stores. Besides, there is Blue Origin, the aerospace company privately owned by Bezos, which is on a mission to make spaceflight possible for everyone.

Be that as it may, a lot more disruption aimed at reaching the common man is on the anvil.

The most far-reaching and impactful technologies being developed today are for Amazons own use, but some others have the potential to disrupt every sector.

The technology marvels that Amazon Web Services the largest profit driving unit in Bezos stable is working on could jolt several industries, including in India, in the same way that Amazon once disrupted retail. In retail, while things like the size of the catalogue, advertising and other stuff might play a role in success, at Amazon, I think success is largely technology driven, said Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels.

The ecommerce giant is using advances in technology to disrupt several sectors outside of retail though medicine, banking, logistics, robotics, agriculture and much more. Interestingly, some of that work is happening in India.

Initially, the thinking was around allowing enterprises in these sectors to grow by using its cloud storage and computing capabilities.

Now, Amazons reach has become more nuanced and it has moved up the value chain. For example, no longer is Amazon offering banks a place to securely store information, it is going beyond by offering tools to detect fraud, making it unnecessary for the lenders to build expensive data science teams in-house.

It is a similar story in other industries, made possible due to the massive amounts of data that Amazon collects and processes.

We give people the software capability, so they no longer need to worry about that side of things. Most of our services are machine learning under the covers (and) thats possible mostly because theres so much data available for us to do that, Vogels said.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Amazon is moving up the value chain in offering services backed by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to automate repetitive tasks done by human beings. Enterprise customers will simply be able to buy into these services with minimal customisation and without a large data science and artificial intelligence team. In December, AWS launched its Fraud Detector service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent activity online, such as payment fraud and creation of fake accounts. Even large banks in India have struggled to put together teams to build machine learning models for fraud detection, but with such a service they can train their systems easily. Code Guru is another service that uses Machine Learning to do code reviews and spit out application performance recommendations, giving specific recommendations to fix code. Today, this is largely done manually, with several non-technology companies struggling to build great software for themselves due to bad code. Transcribe Medical is a service that uses Amazons voice technology to create accurate transcriptions from medical consultations between patients and physicians. Medical transcription as a service is a big industry in India, and Indias IT service giants hire thousands to review code. These services are expected to replace mundane manual tasks, freeing up resources for sophisticated tasks, and could lead to disruption in several sectors in the country.

Medicine Hospitals in the United States have to save imaging reports for years. Earlier these were stored on tapes, since doing so digitally cost millions of dollars. The advent of cheaper cloud storage meant new scans could be saved digitally, making them accessible to doctors on demand. Now, doctors could refer to a patients earlier CT scan and compare that with the new one to diagnose an ailment, said Shez Partovi, worldwide lead for healthcare, life sciences, genomics, medical devices and agri-tech at Amazon. The power of cloud and AWS own capabilities in medical technology have only expanded since. Healthcare and life sciences form rapidly scaling units of AWS, which is building a suite of tools that allow breakthroughs in medicine from hospitals using the tools to do process modelling or operational forecasting, refining the selection of candidate drugs for trial or delivering diagnoses through computer imaging. Developed markets will be the first to adopt such technologies, but AWS is seeing demand surge from the developing world, including India. Not everyone is within a mile of a radiologist or physician, so diagnostics through AI could solve for that. Further, theres a lack of highly trained people, but when all you have to do is take an image, it requires a lot less training, said Partovi.

Space Bezos, in his private capacity, is now looking to connect remote regions with high-speed broadband. He is building a network of over 3,000 satellites through Project Kuiper, which will compete with Elon Musks SpaceX and Airbusbacked OneWeb. The bigger bet is in outer space though. His rocket company Blue Origin has already done commercial payloads on New Shepard, the reusable rocket that competes with SpaceXs Falcon 9. The capsule atop the New Shepard can carry six passengers, which Bezos looks to capitalise on for space tourism, a commercial opportunity most private space agencies are looking at. It is also building a reusable rocket - Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth which can carry payloads of as much as 45 tonnes in low earth orbit. Bezos aim, however, is to land on the Moon. His Blue Moon lander can deliver large infrastructure payloads with high accuracy to pre-position systems for future missions. The larger variant of Blue Moon has been designed to land a vehicle that will allow the United States to return to the Moon by 2024.

Robotics Amazons take on robotics is grounds-up. The company has been part of an opensource network that is developing ROS 2 or Robot Operating System 2, which will be commercial-grade, secure, hardened and peer reviewed in order to make it easier for developers to build robots. There is an incredible amount of promise and potential in robotics, but if you look at what a robot developer has to do to get things up and running, its an incredible amount of work, said Roger Barga, general manager, AWS Robotics and Autonomous Services, at Amazon Web Services. Apart from building the software that robots will run on, AWS is also making tools that will help developers simulate robots virtually before deploying them on the ground, gather data to run analytics on the cloud and even manage a fleet of robots. While AWS will largely build tools for developers, as capabilities such as autonomous navigation become commonplace, the company could look to build them in-house and offer them as a service to robot developers, Barga said. With the advent of 5G technology, more of the processing capabilities of robots will be offloaded to the cloud, making them smarter and giving them real-time analytics capabilities to do a better job. For India, robot builders will be able to get into the business far more easily, having all the tools on access, overcoming the barrier of a lack of fundamental research in robotics.

Enterprise Technology AWS might be a behemoth in the cloud computing space, but cloud still makes up just 3% of all IT in the world. The rest remains on-premise. While a lot will migrate to the cloud, some will not. In order to get into the action in the on-premise market, Amazon has innovated on services that run on a customers data centre, offering capabilities as if the data is stored on the cloud.

With Outposts, which was announced last month, AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools will be able to run on a customers data centre. Essentially, this will allow enterprises to run services on data housed within their own data centres, just like how they would if it had been stored on AWS. The other big problem that AWS is looking to solve is not having its own data centres close enough to customers who require extremely low-latency computing. For this, the company has introduced a new service called Local Zones, where it deploys own hardware closer to a large population, industry, and IT centre where no AWS Region exists today. Both these new services from AWS could be valuable in India given the lower reach of cloud computing among enterprises as well as stricter data localisation requirements.

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From retail to robotics, Jeff Bezos is betting big on technology - ETBrandEquity.com

There are thousands of apps on the Google Play Store, all trying to grab your attention. And truth be told, 2019 was a slow year for apps, despite some of the big names still dominating the space.

In this article, well take a look at some of the most popular Android apps of 2019/

Google Drive is Androids cloud storage solution and it has never let me down (to date). Android users get 15GB storage space for free when signing up, with premium packages available to those who need more.

The Google Drive suite of apps also includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Keep. The latter is so amazing, it gets its own section.

Google Maps can be used for so much more than just navigating from point A to point B. It is the hub for all my travel plans; its where I get traffic data and find places of interest such as coffee shops, accommodation, etc.

You can create lists I have lists for places and landmarks I want to visit. I also created a checklist for interesting accommodation spot. Google Maps now also comes with AR walking directions.

I used Podcast Republic for years (before switching over to Spotify Premium, that is) but Ill still highly recommend it for non-Spotify people.

Podcast Republicallows you to manage yourPodcasts, Radios, Audio books, YouTube channels, SoundCloud channels and RSS news/blog feeds all within a single app.

LastPass is a password manager which keeps all your login details secure in one place. The cross-platform app can be accessed from your PC, mobile device, and tablet.

You can also grab LastPass Authenticator to go along with it for added security.

One of Googles most under-used apps, without a doubt. This little note-taking apps sure packs a punch. Sure, there are other more complex note-taking apps, but Keeps simplicity is the thing that truly hooked me.

Its effortless to use; you can search for notes easily this helps when it gets to the point where you have more than 200 notes. Search by theme, search by assigned colour, search by keywords and hashtags, search any way you like.

In addition, it works well with other apps too: Set reminders, use the Google Assistant to save notes, use Google Docs to sync Keep notes, or use Googles web apps with Keep.

Also read Year in review: Best Apple apps of 2019

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Year in review: Best Android apps of 2019 - The South African

I've been looking at storage technology for over 40 years, beginning with choosing mass storage for the original Apple ][ I bought in 1978. $800 for a 140KB floppy, or $50 for a Panasonic cassette deck? Yep, I bought the cassette deck, which taught me the meaning of random access storage.

Every decade since, the pace of change in storage has accelerated, and the 'teens were no exception. Drive that change are 3 key technologies.

The first time I wrote about flash memory for ZDNet, one reader complained that he was expecting to hear about Adobe Flash, the now obsolete graphics standard. No one makes that mistake today!

Flash was invented in the 1980s by Toshiba, whose storage division was spun off last year as Kioxia. Flash was slow to take off because, as a semiconductor, it took decades to build the volumes that allowed costs to drop. In 1991, I paid $400 for a 10MB Compact Flash card - $40/MB - for my favorite notebook of all time, the HP Omnibook 300.

Flash enabled the iPhone, and replaced 8mm magnetic video tapes - I still have a drawer full - and pretty much killed 35mm film cameras. As the industry invested billions in new fabs, the price has continued to decline, making flash the dominant solid state storage in the world today.

It wasn't until circa 2005 that flash became as cheap as DRAM, and that's when designers woke up to its potential in the data center, where FusionIO's fast but costly PCIe SSDs were popular. But the disastrous floods in Thailand in 2011, which destroyed almost half of the world's hard drive production capacity, forced a spike in HDD prices that suddenly made flash SSDs look relatively affordable.

While Apple led the charge to SSDs, offering them in the first MacBook Air back in 2008, it was the spike in HDD prices that made many people realize that despite their high price per GB, SSDs really improved their system performance. With their widespread adoption in even entry level machines, the market for client side HDDs collapsed, with volumes dropping for the last five years.

But fear not, HDDs, like tape, will continue to have a home in data centers for decades to come. They are still significantly cheaper than flash SSDs per GB, which is what will keep the cloud vendors buying them.

The biggest storage story of the teens was the advent of cloud storage, along with cloud infrastructure. Cloud has dramatically reduced the business and technology friction of acquiring and managing IT infrastructure.

Cloud has had knock-on effects in several areas:- Cloud has took the wind out of the once-robust storage array market. EMC, once the behemoth of data storage, sold itself to Dell. The remaining independents, especially startups, tend to focus on either direct sales to the cloud giants, or selling cloud-like infrastructure to enterprises. - Cloud has made storage advances largely proprietary and hidden. When you are operating at 10000x the scale of major enterprises, employ armies of PhDs, and control your entire stack, there is no reason to share tech discoveries.- Likewise, suppliers make investments, such as in 100GB Blu-ray discs, that seem unjustified by consumer demand. I call this the shadow IT market.

Cloud has made data infrastructure a utility. Just as we don't know where the power in our homes comes from, neither do we know where much of our computing takes place, especially for mobile devices. Cloud won't replace on premise systems totally, but it is highly competitive.

As vast as these changes have been, the 20's will dwarf them. More on that later. Happy New Year!

Comments welcome!

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The 3 biggest storage advances of the 2010s - ZDNet

There is no shortage of cloud storage services. You can choose from Google Drive, OneDrive, Apple iCloud, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, and many others. But the two most popular services are Google Drive and Microsofts OneDrive. Both Google and Microsoft have deeply integrated their cloud offerings with other services to give you a better user experience. If you cant decide which one to opt for, this Google Drive vs OneDrive comparison should help you decide.

Google Drive and OneDrive have become platform-agnostic. You can use them on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and other platforms without any issues. They let you access your files across devices. Both services also have a bunch of collaboration tools to let you share files and collaborate with others.

Both Google and Microsoft have a free plan with a limited amount of cloud storage. The free plans are good enough for most users who use cloud only to store or back up photos and documents. Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage, which is significantly higher than OneDrives 5GB. But the Google Drive storage is used for all of Googles services including Gmail. It means you could run out of storage faster than you expect.

If you need more storage, Google charges $2 per month or $20 per year for 100GB of cloud storage. If you want 200GB, its going to cost $3 per month or $30 per year. Googles 2TB plan costs $10 per month or $100 per year. The 10TB plan costs $100 per month and 20TB plan is going to set you back by $200 per month. Its worth pointing out you can extend Googles storage to other people in your Google Family.

OneDrive is relatively more expensive, mainly because Microsoft uses a different pricing strategy. The Redmond-based software giant has bundled OneDrive into the Microsoft Office subscription. The Office 365 Home costs $100 per year. It gives you access to Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Access, and Publisher for PC along with 1TB of OneDrive storage.

You can also share the Office 365 Home plan with five of your family members, each of whom will get their own 1TB of cloud storage. For those who want a personal plan, Microsoft has Office 365 Personal for $70 per year. It gives you 1TB of cloud storage along with the Office tools.

If you only want the OneDrive storage without any Office tools, you can get 100GB of cloud storage for $2 per month. 1TB of OneDrive storage costs $7 per month or $70 per year, and 6TB cloud storage will set you back by $10 per month or $100 per year.

Both cloud services allow you to access their file management features via a web browser. The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. The file management system is similar to that of the desktop file managers. They both have a variety of viewing options such as thumbnails and list, and give you quick access to your recent files.

The search function is much better in Google Drive. It shows the search results live as you type each letter. It also has an advanced search option that you can toggle on. The advanced search lets you filter search results by date, keyword, file type, etc. The search function in OneDrive is still in its infancy. You wont be able to view the search results until you hit theEnter button.

The file sharing system is similar on the two services. You can share a direct link or a persons email address to give them access to a file. Both services allow you to set permissions for anyone accessing the files you shared. In Google Drive, you can let others View, Comment, or Edit for free users. The advanced permission settings are available only to paid users.

Microsofts OneDrive comes with block-level copying technology, which breaks files into smaller packages for uploading and saving to the cloud. If you make a change in your file, only the packages that have been modified are re-uploaded to the cloud. It speeds up the uploading process.

Both services send your files to the cloud via HTTPS encryption. Microsoft and Google encrypt files using their own keys. It makes it incredibly hard for hackers to decrypt files you have stored with Google or Microsoft even if they break into the servers. But it also means that if someone gains access to your email and password, they can access all your files.

Since Microsoft and Google have encryption keys to your files, they can decrypt them or give law enforcement agencies access to your files. Of course, you can use the E2EE option or other services to encrypt all your Google Drive or OneDrive files yourself.

Google scans the files you upload to Google Drive to mine data that it could use for targeted advertising. It doesnt use that data for malicious purposes. Microsoft doesnt do that. Recently, the Redmond-based software giant introduced a feature called Personal Vault that adds an extra layer of security to your sensitive files.

Free OneDrive users can add only three files to their Personal Vault. The Office 365 subscribers can add as many files as they want, up to the storage limit of their plan. The Personal Vault is locked automatically upon 20 minutes of inactivity. You can access your Personal Vault within OneDrive using a PIN, fingerprint scan, facial scan, an authenticator app, or by entering the authentication code you get via SMS or email.

If you want maximum cloud storage for the price, Google Drive is the way to go. Its plans are relatively cheaper, and Google Drive integrates well with other Google services. Microsofts OneDrive is for people who use its Office tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. The Personal Vault also gives OneDrive an edge over Google Drive in terms of security. You should try out the free plans of both to decide which one is better for your needs.

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Google Drive vs OneDrive: Which is better? - ValueWalk

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With just over a week left on the 2019 calendar, its now time for predictions. Well run several stories featuring the 2020 predictions of industry experts and observers in the field. It all starts today with what is arguably the most critical aspect of the big data question: The data itself.

Theres no denying that Hadoop had a rough year in 2019. But is it completely dead? Haoyuan HY Li, the founder and CTO of Alluxio, says that Hadoop storage, in the form of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is dead, but Hadoop compute, in the form of Apache Spark, lives strong.

There is a lot of talk about Hadoop being dead, Li says. But the Hadoop ecosystem has rising stars. Compute frameworks like Spark and Presto extract more value from data and have been adopted into the broader compute ecosystem. Hadoop storage (HDFS) is dead because of its complexity and cost and because compute fundamentally cannot scale elastically if it stays tied to HDFS. For real-time insights, users need immediate and elastic compute capacity thats available in the cloud. Data in HDFS will move to the most optimal and cost-efficient system, be it cloud storage or on-prem object storage. HDFS will die but Hadoop compute will live on and live strong.

As HDFS data lake deployments slow, Cloudian is ready to swoop in and capture the data into its object store, says Jon Toor, CMO of Cloudian.

In 2020, we will see a growing number of organizations capitalizing on object storage to create structured/tagged data from unstructured data, allowing metadata to be used to make sense of the tsunami of data generated by AI and ML workloads, Toor writes.

The end of one thing, like Hadoop, will give rise the beginning of another, according to ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair.

(Swill Klitch/Shutterstock)

Over the last 10 years or so, weve seen the rise, plateau, and the beginning of the end for Hadoop, Nair says. This isnt because Big Data is dead. Its exactly the opposite. Every organization in the world is becoming a Big Data company. Its a requirement to operate in todays business landscape. Data has become so voluminous, and the need for agility with this data so great, however, that organizations are either building their own data lakes or warehouses, or going directly to the cloud. As that trend accelerates in 2020, well see Hadoop continue to decline.

When data gets big enough, it exerts a gravitational-like force, which makes it difficult to move, while also serving to attract even more data. Understanding data gravity will help organizations overcome barriers to digital transformation, says Chris Sharp, CTO of Digital Realty.

Data is being generated at a rate that many enterprises cant keep up with, Sharp says. Adding to this complexity, enterprises are dealing with data both useful and not useful from multiple locations that is hard to move and utilize effectively. This presents enterprises with a data gravity problem that will prevent digital transformation initiatives from moving forward. In 2020, well see enterprises tackle data gravity by bringing their applications closer to data sources rather than transporting resources to a central location. By localizing data traffic, analytics and management, enterprises will more effectively control their data and scale digital business.

All things being equal, its better to have more data than less of it. But companies can move the needle just by using available technology to make better use of the data they already have, argues Beaumont Vance, the director of AI, data science, and emerging technology at TD Ameritrade.

As companies are creating new data pools and are discovering better techniques to understand findings, we will see the true value of AI delivered like never before, Vance says. At this point, companies are using less than 20% of all internal data, but through new AI capabilities, the remaining 80% of untapped data will be usable and easier to understand. Previous questions which were unanswerable will have obvious findings to help drive massive change across industries and societies.

Big data is tough to manage. What if you could do AI with small data? You can, according to Arka Dhar, the CEO of Zinier.

Going forward, well no longer require massive big data sets to train AI algorithms, Dhar says. In the past, data scientists have always needed large amounts of data to perform accurate inferences with AI models. Advances in AI are allowing us to achieve similar results with far less data.

(Drendan/Shutterstock)

How you store your data dictates what you can do with it. You can do more with data stored in memory than on disk, and in 2020, well see organizations storing more data on memory-based systems, says Abe Kleinfled, the CEO of GridGain.

In 2020, the adoption of in-memory technologies will continue to soar as digital transformation drives companies toward real-time data analysis and decision-making at massive scale, Kleinfled says. Lets say youre collecting real-time data from sensors on a fleet of airplanes to monitor performance and you want to develop a predictive maintenance capability for individual engines. Now you must compare anomalous readings in the real-time data stream with the historical data for a particular engine stored in the data lake. Currently, the only cost-effective way to do this is with an in-memory data integration hub, based on an in-memory computing platform like Apache Ignite that integrates Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and data lake stores like Hadoop.2020 promises to be a pivotal year in the adoption of in-memory computing as data integration hubs continue to expand in enterprises.

Big data can make your wildest business dreams come true. Or it can turn into a total nightmare. The choice is yours, say Eric Raab and Kabir Choudry, vice presidents at Information Builders.

Those that have invested in the solutions to manage, analyze, and properly action their data will have a clearer view of their business and the path to success than has ever been available to them, Raab and Choudry write. Those that have not will be left with a mountain of information that they cannot truly understand or responsibly act upon, leaving them to make ill-informed decisions or deal with data paralysis.

Lets face it: Managing big data is hard. That doesnt change in 2020, which will bring a renewed focus on data orchestration, data discovery, data preparation, and model management, says Todd Wright, head of data management and data privacy solutions at SAS.

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According to the World Economic Forum, it is predicted by 2020 that the amount of data we produce will reach a staggering 44 zettabytes, Wright says. The promise of big data never came from simply having more data and from more sources but by being able to develop analytical models to gain better insights on this data. With all the work being done to advance the work of analytics, AI and ML, it is all for not if organizations do not have a data management program in place that can access, integrate, cleanse and govern all this data.

Organizations are filling up NVMe drives as fast as they can to help accelerate the storage and analysis of data, particularly involving IoT. But doing this alone is not enough to ensure success, says Nader Salessi, the CEO and founder of NGD Systems.

NVMe has provided a measure of relief and proven to remove existing storage protocol bottlenecks for platforms churning out terabytes and petabytes of data on a regular basis, Salessi writes. Even though NVMe is substantially faster, it is not fast enough by itself when petabytes of data are required to be analyzed and processed in real time. This is where computational storage comes in and solves the problem of data management and movement.

Data integration has never been easy. With the ongoing data explosion and expansion of AI and ML use cases, it gets even harder. One architectural concept showing promise is the data fabric, according to the folks at Denodo.

Through real-time access to fresh data from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data sets, data fabric will enable organization to focus more on ML and AI in the coming year, the Denodo company says. With the advancement in smart technologies and IoT devices, a dynamic data fabric provides quick, secure and reliable access to vast data through logical data warehouse architecture. Thus, facilitating AI-driven technologies and revolutionizing businesses.

Seeing how disparate data sets are connected using semantic AI and enterprise knowledge graphs (EKG) provide other approaches for tackling the data silo problem, says Saurav Chakravorty, the principal data scientist at Brillio.

An organizations valuable information and knowledge is often spread across multiple documents and data silos, creating big headaches for a business, Chakravorty says. EKG will allow organizations to do away with semantic incoherency in fragmented knowledge landscape. Semantic AI with EKG complement each other and can bring great value overall to enterprise investments in data lake and big data.

2020 holds the potential to be a breakout year for storage-class memory, argues Charles Fan, the CEO and co-founder of MemVerge.

With an increasing demand from data center applications, paired with the increased speed of processing, there will be a huge push towards a memory-centric data center, Fan says. Computing innovations are happening at a rapid pace, with more and more computation techfrom x86 to GPUs to ARM. This will continue to open up new topology between CPU and memory units. While architecture currently tends to be more disaggregated between the computing layer and the storage layer, I believe we are headed towards a memory-centric data center very soon.

We are rapidly moving toward a converged storage and processing architecture for edge deployments, says Bob Moul, CEO of machine data intelligence platform Circonus.

Gartner predicts there will be approximately 20 billion IoT-connected devices by 2020, Moul says. As IoT networks swell and become more advanced, the resources and tools that managed them must do the same. Companies will need to adopt scalable storage solutions to accommodate the explosion of data that promises to outpace current technologys ability to contain, process and provide valuable insights.

Dark data will finally see the light of day in 2020, according to Rob Perry, the vice president of product marketing at ASG Technologies.

(PictureDragon/Shutterstock)

Every organization has islands of data, collected but no longer (or perhaps never) used for business purposes, Perry says. While the cost of storing data has decreased dramatically, the risk premium of storing it has increased dramatically. This dark data could contain personal information that must be disclosed and protected. It could include information subject to Data Subject Access Requests and possible required deletion, but if you dont know its there, you cant meet the requirements of the law. Though, this data could also hold the insight that opens up new opportunities that drive business growth. Keeping it in the dark increases risk and possibly masks opportunity. Organizations will put a new focus on shining the light on their dark data.

Open source databases will have a good year in 2020, predicts Karthik Ranganathan, founder and CTO at Yugabyte.

Open source databases that claimed zero percent of the market ten years ago, now make up more than 7%, Ranganathan says. Its clear that the market is shifting and in 2020, there will be an increase in commitment to true open source. This goes against the recent trend of database and data infrastructure companies abandoning open source licenses for some or all of their core projects. However, as technology rapidly advances it will be in the best interest of database providers to switch to a 100% open source model, since freemium models take a significantly longer period of time for the software to mature to the same level as a true open source offering.

However, 2019 saw a pull back away from pure open source business models from companies like Confluent, Redis, and MongoDB. Instead of open source software, the market will be responsive to open services, says Dhruba Borthakur, the co-founder and CTO of Rockset.

Since the public cloud has completely changed the way software is delivered and monetized, I predict that the time for open sourcing new, disruptive data technologies will be over as of 2020, Borthakur says. Existing open-source software will continue to run its course, but there is no incentive for builders or users to choose open source over open services for new data offerings..Ironically, it was ease of adoption that drove the open-source wave, and it is ease of adoption of open services that will precipitate the demise of open source particularly in areas like data management. Just as the last decade was the era of open-source infrastructure, the next decade belongs to open services in the cloud.

Related Items:

2019: A Big Data Year in Review Part One

2019: A Big Data Year in Review Part Two

Excerpt from:
Big Data Predictions: What 2020 Will Bring - Datanami