The Datacenter in 2020 and Beyond: More Edge, 'As-a-Service' and AI -- Redmondmag.com

The next few years are going to be lively ones for the datacenter, with more than half of new infrastructure being deployed in edge locations, half of core enterprise datacenters and two-thirds of the major edge IT sites leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), more than half of datacenter infrastructure running "as-a-service" solutions, and a steadily growing number of companies relying on colocation partners. Those were a few of the predictions offered by the industry watchers at IDC last week with the release the analyst firm's first annual "Futurescape" forecast focused on the datacenter. Emphasizing trends emerging in 2020, the report was presented in part during a webcast led by some of its authors. "At the core of all of our predictions is the reality that technology is very rapidly moving from the back office to the front office," said Jennifer Cooke, research director of IDC's Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends and Strategies research team. "And a lot of this is about the boundaries between an organization's internal operations and external ecosystem of customers, partners and markets. These boundaries are just disappearing."