With the end of the year quickly approaching, it is a great time to look back on the past year, and to look forward in anticipation for what is coming in 2018.
2017 was an interesting year. I saw an explosion in the development of chatbots of various different types. Some were very simple, others used both Watson Conversation and the Watson Discovery service to provide a deeper user experience – with an ability to answer both short tail and long tail questions. I saw a huge uptick in interest in basic Cloud approaches, and a lot of interest in containers and Kubernetes. I expect that both of these trends will continue into 2018.
In 2018 I expect to see the IBM Cloud mature and expand in it’s ability to quickly provide development, test and production computing environments for our customers. I also expect that more people will become interested in hybrid cloud approaches, and will want to understand some best practices for managing these complex environments. I am also excited about some of the excellent cognitive projects that I have seen which could soon be in production for our customers. I also expect that some of our more advanced customers will be looking at how cognitive technologies can be incorporated into their current DevOps processes, and how these processes can be expanded into the cloud.
I hope that your 2017 was a good one, and I hope that you have a happy and safe holiday season.
Dan Toczala's Blog 