John Abbott covers systems, storage and software infrastructure topics for 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Over a career that spans more than 30 years, he has pioneered specialist technology coverage in such areas as Unix, supercomputing, system architecture, software development and storage.
As one of the co-founders of The 451 Group in October 1999, John ran analyst operations from the company's San Francisco office. He has been a principal author on many 451 Research Special Reports, including those on storage virtualization and blade servers – the first comprehensive surveys of either subject to be published. More recently John has focused on topics such as converged infrastructure, new systems architectures, AI and deep learning accelerators. He helped establish 4SIGHT, the 451 Research framework for the forward-looking, long-term coverage of emerging technologies.
John began covering the technology sector in 1984, building on his previous experience as a technical author and direct involvement using mainframes, early PCs and Unix workstations. As a freelance journalist, he contributed to publications including Computing, Computer Weekly, The Financial Times and The Times. In 1987, he was appointed editor of ComputerWire's weekly Unix newsletter, Unigram.X, and later became editor of the company's daily Computergram International service, first in London and subsequently in San Francisco. He established the 451 Research office in San Francisco and lived there for over a decade.
John studied music at the University of Keele and has an MA in modern English literature from the University of London.
In February, Pat Gelsinger will become the eighth CEO of Intel, taking over from Bob Swan, who was appointed leader of Intel back in June 2018. Gelsinger, who has led VMware since 2012, previously spent 30 years at Intel, where he worked with Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and also with Intel's best-known CEO, Andy Grove.
The year ahead will see an acceleration of digital transformation initiatives that support business outcomes of agility, resilience and cost containment. The transition to hybrid, multicloud IT infrastructures supported by cloud-native application development tools and practices will only accelerate, as we will still have to operate under pandemic conditions for a minimum of several months into 2021.
Formed in 2011 by Synnex to design and build systems for the big hyperscalers, Hyve now is targeting smaller cloud providers, telcos and enterprises with its new AI and edge infrastructure. The market is evolving, and hyperscale architectures are being used as a template for other datacenters as customers explore hybrid cloud options.
A new independent player in scale-out interconnects has been formed through a spinoff of Intel's Omni-Path business. Cornelis will focus on the HPC sector, but has a roadmap for future development that will likely expand use cases toward infrastructure for AI and data analytics.
The managed services infrastructure business will become a new publicly traded company, while IBM itself shrinks down and concentrates on Red Hat at the core of its hybrid cloud platform. But it may still be difficult for a reduced-size Big Blue to spark the needed growth from within if it gradually fades in importance in the IT department.
The software-defined storage vendor offers a platform built around the open source storage project Ceph. Unlike SDS vendors that leverage commodity x86 hardware, SoftIron has poured its efforts into creating Arm-based storage hardware optimized for Ceph.
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