Machine learning and automation are already widely welcomed as a … Growth in digital business is also driving interest in artificial intelligence, …

VMware is developing a cloud service to monitor software in customer deployments and tune it automatically to improve performance. This is Project Magna and its first target is vSAN in hyperconverged infrastructure. It will work like this: customers select their key performance indicator – read or write optimisation or both. Magna examines their vSAN environment and compares it to the KPI average for stored and monitored deployments. If the site is below average, Magna changes it to bring it closer to the average.

If the business IT market in 2016 was defined by an increased focus on cybersecurity vulnerabilities (including from the Internet of Things), cloud adoption and a shift to hyperconverged infrastructure, what does that augur for 2017? Often, predictions about the year ahead are untethered from the year that was, and do not have much of a connection to underlying trends. The world of enterprise technology likely will not be radically different next year than it was in 2016. However, trends that have been ongoing may accelerate or evolve, as technologies mature and businesses get more acclimated to them. For example, Hardware as a Service may start to take off.