Wikibon 2021 Research Focus
The Wikibon 2021 research focus is based on a community-based approach to deliver in-depth research and analysis across a broad range of enterprise technology topics. Our community has been built from the ground up using collaborative methods powered by Wikibon’s ethos of open content and theCUBE.
Wikibon was founded on the premise that practitioners collectively possess more knowledge than any one person or research entity. We have developed methods to package and curate that knowledge for our community. theCUBE is a digital offering that for more than ten years has operated TV productions at tech events. In addition, theCUBE operates digital studios on-premises and remotely from its offices in northern California and Massachusetts.
We also partner with several expert data providers, including Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), which publishes quarterly spending intentions data based on surveys of CIOs and enterprise technology buyers. Under our agreement, we can curate this survey data and selectively present data to support our research initiatives.
Our community comprises more than 50,000 individuals, many of whom have contributed their knowledge directly through interviews on theCUBE or in collaborative sessions with Wikibon Analysts.
Broadly, Wikibon’s topical coverage spans the following seven primary areas that have overlapping content vectors:
- Cloud
- Infrastructure
- Data
- Security
- Enterprise Software
- Edge computing
- Emerging technologies
We provide selective market data, industry trends, customer spending patterns, key customer challenges, technology provider solutions, economic analysis, and analysis of relevant news within these sectors.
Cloud/Developers/Containers
Our cloud coverage primarily focuses on IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, emphasizing the largest hyperscale cloud providers– namely AWS, Microsoft, and Google. We’ve recently added coverage of Alibaba. We focus on developers, which spans many sectors but generally bleeds into our cloud coverage, as do containers.
In addition, we sometimes touch on leading SaaS players in our cloud coverage, but we tend to cover them in our enterprise software activities.
Infrastructure
We collaborate with a large community of IT practitioners who have supported applications running on-premises within their own data centers for years. Our coverage spans traditional markets and associated vendors in servers, networking, storage, and the application of related technologies. Over the years, these individuals have seen their roles shift toward facilitating new computing models, the most significant being the emergence of the public cloud and the catalyst that has created for hybrid and cross-cloud models. The types of vendors we cover most closely in this space are Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, Pure Storage, NetApp, Nutanix, and many others.
Data/AI/Database/Related Tooling
For more than a decade, Wikibon has invested in coverage of data and related topics, including so-called big data and the variety of open-source projects associated with Hadoop and its descendants. Our coverage of data is based on the premise that a digital business is a data business, and organizations must put data at the core of their operations. We believe the cloud has facilitated this transformation; however, organizations continue to struggle to get more value from data. Typical vendor coverage includes large database players like Oracle and SAP as well as Snowflake and a host of other database suppliers. We also cover the vendors associated with the early days of big data like Cloudera.
Enterprise Security
Our security coverage was upgraded in earnest in 2019 and further accelerated because of the work from home transition. Our primary focus here is understanding the shift from a traditional centralized network to supporting remote workers and corresponding changes in network architecture. Specifically, we focus on the increased emphasis on cloud security, zero trust, endpoint, identity access management, the role of analytics, ransomware remediation approaches, and related topics. In addition, our research has covered the “shared responsibility” model popularized by the hyperscale cloud players, notably AWS and its IaaS competitors.
We cover a wide range of companies, including Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Okta, Zscaler, Fortinet, and many others in the highly fragmented security space.
Enterprise Software
Edge Computing
Our work in this area generally focuses on sizing the massive IoT and edge opportunity and understanding the architectural requirements for real-time inferencing at the edge. We have performed extensive research using autonomous vehicles as a use case and studying Tesla’s decision to develop an Arm-based system and the implications for industry progression.
We believe that developers will win the edge, and cloud models will expand to the edge. We believe these models will require completely different architectures than today’s general-purpose x86 compute approaches. Specifically, we see highly efficient processors at the edge handling real-time streaming workloads where much of the data is ephemeral. Some of this data is persisted at the edge, and a portion gets shipped back to the cloud for modeling and training purposes.
Emerging Technologies
Disruption Forecasts
Spending Analysis
We actively analyze spending patterns in enterprise tech across a broad taxonomy. We collaborate extensively with ETR, our data partner, to track tech spending at the macro level and within several sectors, including those cited above.
As always, we welcome feedback from our community on areas you’d like to see us cover. Please, if you have a request, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Thanks for your continued support.
