Structure News: Three questions for 2016

Where We Wish You A Cloudy Christmas December 24th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk another Oracle attempt to muscle in on the cloud, about the last big tech IPO of 2015 (maybe), and three things we're thinking about as the calendar turns. STRUCTURE NEWS We're wrapping up our first year (well, six months really) as an independent events company, and we're thrilled with how things went in 2015. Thanks to our speakers, attendees, sponsors, and partners, Structure 2015 came back to life and allowed us to commit to a full slate of familiar conferences for 2016: Structure Data (March 9-10th), Structure Connect (June 22-23rd) and Structure 2016 (November 9-10th), all of which will be held at our old stomping grounds in Mission Bay at UCSF.   Our year got off to a challenging start, but it's ending on an up note. Thanks again to all who have supported Structure over the past six months, and get ready to see some brand-new conference themes in 2016 and beyond. INDUSTRY NEWS ORACLE JUST BOUGHT A TINY YEAR-OLD CLOUD COMPUTING STARTUP CALLED STACKENGINE It was a pretty slow week in tech, but Oracle made another cloud-related move, snapping up StackEngine for an undisclosed amount, as reported by Business Insider. StackEngine helps companies deploy containers, and Peter Magnusson told Fortune that the deal will help Oracle sell container-management services to big companies that are intrigued by containers but hesitant to take the plunge. NUTANIX FILES TO GO PUBLIC WITH $200 MILLION IPO It's not clear if datacenter storage vendor Nutanix will trade shares with the public by the end of the year, but what might be the last big enterprise tech IPO of the year was made official this week with the filing of an S-1. Venturebeat reports that Nutanix wants to raise $200 million, and that according to its financial reports, the company lost $126 million on $241 million in revenue during its last fiscal year. MACHINE LEARNING WILL REPLACE MOST JOBS, PREDICTS VINOD KHOSLA Structure 2015 speaker Vinod Khosla was back at it this week, telling attendees at the Post-Seed conference that "the impact of machine learning on society will be bigger than the impact of mobile on society," according to a writeup from Inc. Khosla warned of a similar if more limited impact at Structure 2014, when he predicted that datacenter automation was coming for a lot of IT jobs. NOBODY KNEW HOW BIG A DEAL THE CLOUD WOULD BE: THEY DO NOW With all due respect to this great retrospective from Wired's Cade Metz, the forces behind the original Structure conference knew how big a deal the cloud would be. Still, Wired accurately captures the disdain for cloud services espoused by the powers-that-be in the tech industry until it was too late, and probably puts the nail in the private cloud's coffin. PALANTIR, A SILICON VALLEY STARTUP, RAISES ANOTHER $880 MILLION Structure Data 2014 veteran Palantir has amassed a larger war chest after its latest round of funding, which brings the total amount of money raised by the secretive startup to $2 billion, according to the New York Times. That puts Palantir's total value at around $20 billion, which is pretty big even by Silicon Valley 2015 standards.   BIG PICTURE So what did we learn in 2015? It was perhaps the most mainstream year for the cloud industry, as illustrated by the Wired piece above. Sales and marketing people for cloud companies are no longer evangelists; they're selling features and services instead of spending the first 15 minutes of the call explaining what the cloud is all about. That maturity has raised some new questions about the future direction of this industry that might not be resolved in 2016, but that will be top-of-mind once we get to Structure 2016. Will Amazon run away with the public cloud infrastructure market? We all knew Amazon Web Services dominated this market, but this year we learned just how much money that is contributing to Amazon's bottom line. As Microsoft and Google struggle to overcome Amazon's built-in advantages (a cynic might call this "lock-in"), will "you don’t get fired for buying AWS" become this generation's IT plan? Will containers finally go mainstream? As Adrian Cockcroft pointed out at Structure, there are way more companies testing containers in their application environments but still relatively few using them in production. As hybrid clouds and lock-in concerns grow, container-based development could make huge strides in 2016 and create a whole new industry around Docker. Is machine learning finally on the cusp of a huge breakthrough? IEEE Spectrum published a great interview with Facebook's Yann LeCun on the ups and downs of artificial intelligence over the last few decades, in which they discuss the concept of "AI winters" caused by over-exuberant and under-performing AI backers. But at the risk of causing another AI winter in eight months, LeCun explains why this is such an interesting time for artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the billions of dollars being poured into this space is certainly its own signal. We'll tackle that last question at Structure Data in March. And we're going to take a break from the newsletter next week, returning in January. Until then, happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year from all of us at Structure.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. 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