Four Transformational Trends Shaping the Future of IT

Date:   Friday , June 26, 2015

Altisource Portfolio Solutions SA (NASDAQ: ASPA) is a 2000 founded national alliance of independent mortgage bankers, correspondent lenders and suppliers of mortgage products & services. The Luxembourg headquartered company has a current market capitalization of $575.37 million.

Software architectures, mobile clients and data center technology all have continued to evolve at a dizzying pace over last five years. In particular, there are four key secular trends that are having an impact on all industries through technology - often in transformational fashion.

  1. Micro-service architecture: In business software, the concept of micro-service architecture - defined as a unit of software that is independently replaceable and upgradable - is one to watch. This is an evolution of the earlier service oriented architecture approach, but far more granular, self-contained and with a smaller footprint.It\'s closely aligned with the operating system direction of providing containers with their own dedicated or optimistic allocation of system resources. It is also closely aligned with \"any smart device\" user becoming the primary target for business applications.

    Micro-service architecture makes it easier for developers to work with smaller code bases, enable services to be brought on line quickly and have an easy way to scale up on commodity hardware by using lightweight containers.
    The down-side? Far more attention needs to be paid to the design and management of these micro-services and how they interact.


  2. Opportunities in big data: When it comes to data architecture, a lot has been written about big data and no-SQL databases. While certain no-SQL database use cases are extremely well known and popular, for core enterprise systems we are heading into a new-SQL world. This is SQL that works over shared databases and brings together both the scale of no-SQL databases with the ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, durable) guarantees of the traditional SQL world.

    Now that the initial euphoria over big data technologies such as Hadoop has plateaued, companies are taking a more mature and serious look at even more challenging problems - such as how to manage ever-increasing enterprise data effectively, whether structured or unstructured. The concept of an enterprise data lake with several key features is finally beginning to be addressed. These features include:

    • Proper metadata, data lineage and the governance associated with it;

    • A data lake that is fed by transactional databases and integration buses;

    • And a lake that acts as the downstream provider of clean consistent data to warehouses, marts and other reporting/analytics solutions.


  3. The software-defined data center: Over last couple of years, data centers have been going through a complete overhaul with the advent of mega data centers of cloud providers. As a result, data centers are becoming more \"software-defined\". Network, storage and computation are simply becoming resources. It\'s the software that now assigns jobs and tasks, configured and scheduled dynamically to conform to specific service level agreements. Omega and Borg - new efforts becoming public through disclosures from Google - point to the future here.

    In addition, Apache MESOS and to a lesser extent Apache YARN have been trying to address the problem of how to efficiently and dynamically assign resources to variety of jobs driven by service levels. This configurable data center trend will continue, with some of the algorithms eventually becoming integrated into hardware as FPGA (field programmable gate arrays), making their way into custom built servers at scale.


  4. 4) Moore\'s Law and the future of NVMe: As Moore\'s Law turns 50, a big change awaits server and client hardware with advent of high density non-volatile memory. With solid state technology eventually minimizing the performance and durability barriers between storage and memory that have existed for decades, a major new cycle of innovations in software await us.By combining data analytics with high performance clustered non-volatile memory, we\'ll achieve the ability to implement insights based on recent and past data to near real time.

    Taken together, these four transformational trends have the potential to truly reshape how companies do business. It\'s essential for technology leaders to stay on top of this fast-changing landscape so they can provide the most strategic and effective guidance possible for their organizations.