This was originally posted on the Amalgam Insights website.

As the year comes to a close, I have had the opportunity to reflect on what has transpired in 2017 and look ahead to 2018. Some of my recent thoughts on 2017 have been published in InformationWeek, CMSWire, and DevOps.com. These articles provide a peek ahead at emerging 2018 trends.

In the two areas I cover, collaboration and DevOps/Developer Trends, I plan to continue to look at:

• The continued transformation of the collaboration market. I am expecting a “mass extinction event” of products in this space. That doesn’t mean the collaboration market will evaporate. Instead, I am looking for niche products that address specific collaboration segments to thrive while a handful of large collaboration players will consume the general market.
  
• The emergence of NoOps, for No Operations, in the mid-market. The Amazon push to serverless products is a bellwether of the upcoming move toward cloud vendor operations supplanting company IT sysops.
  
• 2018 will be the year of the container. Containers have been growing in popularity over the past several years but 2018 will be the year when they become truly mass market. The growth in the ecosystem, especially the widespread availability of cloud Kubernetes services, will make containers more palatable to a wider market
  
• Integrated DevOps pipelines will make DevOps more efficient… if we can get the politics out of IT.
  
• Machine learning will continue to be integrated into developer tools which, in turn, will make more complex coding and deployment jobs easier.
  

As you know, I joined Amalgam Insights in September. Amalgam Insights, or AI, is a full-service market analyst firm. I‘d welcome the opportunity to learn more about what 2018 holds for you.  Perhaps we can schedule a quick call in the next couple of weeks. Let me know what works best for you.  As always, if I can provide any additional information about AI, I’d be happy to do so!

Thanks, and have a happy holiday season.