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It's that time of year again, 2019 Predictions. But first, let's revisit 2018. HCI continued its meteoric rise, overtaking the Converged market. And with virtually every vendor that has an HCI offering showing growth, all signs point to a continued trend up. There is a lot of hype around public cloud partnerships, hybrid cloud enablement, edge, next generation apps, AI, IoT.

But fact of the matter is that many organizations that I talked to were still leveraging the technology to support a couple of applications, maybe one of which was deemed mission-critical. Now, in 2019, the rubber will hit the proverbial road. We'll see shifts in how HCI is used, to the edge really taking off and hybrid club being embrace through intelligent orchestration and management, leveraging HCI as a foundation in their on-premises environments.

First, now that HCI is considered mainstream, a shift in how the technology is used will take place. Between flexible deployment and consumption models, the incorporation of the latest and greatest hardware technologies like NVMe and GPU integration, and a true need to address next generation apps. Organizations will be looking to HCI more than ever before, whether extending existing deployments or buying net new technology to support resource-hungry applications.

Second on the topic of edge, HCI will continue down the path of becoming the defacto standard for smart edge deployments. I've always felt HCI was the ideal answer for edge and this year organizations will prioritize HCI to meet their edge application requirements, including support for demanding workloads like AI and IoT. Third, hybrid cloud and orchestration will be a focal point for organizations already leveraging or looking to leverage HCI technology.

Organizations want a seamless infrastructure and application management experience and hybrid environments. And while many HCI users already benefit from simplified management of their on-prem environments, the expectation for hybrid orchestration and management will be similar. While many vendors already are down this path of offering tools and solutions to support workload and application management and movement between on-premises and cloud environments, 2019 will come with more of a demand for intelligence.

This is where AI and machine learning will come in as an embedded feature to provide the needed insight to make the right decisions, whether predicting a failure or recommending when and why applications should move into where. With a focus on software defined everything, next generation apps, edge, and hybrid cloud management and orchestration, 2019 is shaping up to be another high growth year for HCI.