Summary Bullets:

• The enterprise data and analytics marketplace has been struggling to hold onto traditional philosophies of control, governance, and discipline, while simultaneously looking way ahead to a future that’s free from such constraints.

• How will that play out over the coming year? We think IoT will emerge as a service, data preparation will permeate data discovery tools, and data itself will form a new marketplace.

The end of each year always seems to race toward us, the closer we get the faster it approaches. Within the U.S. perhaps that’s because we always have a stack of our major holidays in the last month and a half of the year. Perhaps it’s just that the new year, like any good waypoint on a journey, forces us to take stock of where we’ve been and contemplate what lies beyond that arbitrary horizon. And suddenly we’re living two lives at once, which can feel pretty crowded and frenetic.