Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: RackN (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

We are still recovering from the recent massive AWS outage that affected many businesses. Interestingly, RackN CEO and Co-Founder, Rob Hirschfeld, already predicted this kind of outage during our recording of the latest series on 2022 predictions. His exact words were: “We’re going to see all major hyperscalers having 12-hour-plus long outages, something nobody’s going to be looking forward to, but that’s the trend line that we see. It’s more outages, longer durations as they struggle to get things back on track.”

Hirschfeld also predicted that Amazon will follow Google and Facebook and will decouple into multiple businesses. He predicted that while Google went with Alphabet, Facebook with Meta, Amazon would likely split its businesses under a new company name called Zone.

Only time will tell whether the rest of his predictions would end up being true, which he has shared in the video above.

Note: If your company wants to share your predictions with our audience, get in touch with us. 

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi. This is your host, Swapnil Bhartiya. We are back to our series on predictions for 2022 and once again we have with us, Rob Hirschfeld. Rob, before we ask you to grab your crystal ball and share your predictions for the year, I want you to quickly tell us what is RackN all about.

Rob Hirschfeld: I’d be happy to. RackN, it’s a software company that focuses on helping people write better data center infrastructure automation so we believe that companies should be able to run their own infrastructure or manage their own infrastructure.

So that autonomy of being able to do things for yourself is the core of what RackN does. We do it by helping customers manage complexity using infrastructure pipelines, so standard automation using reusable parts, standard patterns and practices that they run, they manage, they control. That’s fundamentally what we do with Digital Rebar.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing about the company. Now let’s grab the crystal ball. Tell me, what predictions do you have for the year?

Rob Hirschfeld: I think that this coming year is going to be a whole bunch of knots in a lot of cases. It’s not the year of IPv6, 5G, SmartNICs, blockchains or self-driving cars. I think this is a year where we put pieces together. It’s a year of integration. It’s a year of hyper-cloud and multi-cloud and people actually sort of settling the dust, as you will, and pulling those pieces together.

I also think as part of this challenge of increasing complexity that we’re seeing, that we’re going to see all major hyperscalers having 12-hour plus long outages, something nobody’s going to be looking forward to, but that’s the trend line that we see. It’s more outages, longer durations as they struggle to get things back on track.

I do think that that means that something like VMware is going to be exciting again, sort of a crazy idea. Actually I’ve been hearing rumors that Oracle is getting more exciting and more interesting. So we’re starting to see people say, “I just need this stuff to work, less drama, more delivery and making things go.”

On the delivery aspect, I do think we’re going to start seeing self-driving trucks coming around and smart roads. There’s a lot of infrastructure money coming in. The simple way that we’re going to make that happen is not on retail side, but on the wholesale truck fleets pieces coming in.

Speaking of truck fleets, my prediction is that Amazon follows Facebook and Google and decouples into multiple businesses and picks a new name for themselves to be the Uber business driving their retail, cloud, logistics, healthcare, all these other businesses. My pick for that name is Zone or Zones. So I think that we will see that type of continued trend at the behemoth scale in the tech market.

I do have a metaverse update. I do think we’re going to start seeing phone-powered VR screens coming in. We’re starting to see a little bit of that. My expectation is that we will see some VR and it’s going to basically be a phone. Your phone will be your VR-powered platform.

I do think that we’re going to see conferences start to return, but I think we’re going to see them all be hybrid and 50% of the scale that they were. So as much as I want to see us back to in-person events and full conferences, I think we’re still going to need another year, at least, to shake it out if we ever return to conferences from the glory days.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing these predictions. Now, you can put your crystal ball back. Now, let’s talk about the company. If I ask you what is going to be the focus of RackN in 2022?

Rob Hirschfeld: 2022 is a really exciting year for RackN because all of the work we’ve been putting into multi-cloud, cloud brokering, or our cluster pattern, our infrastructure pipelines really come together to make the multi-cloud aspects of Digital Rebar much more accessible. So we’re excited to see a whole new group of people coming in and discovering how we do infrastructure as code and realizing just how much we’ve made it possible to do work across teams or across the industry and reduce toil, improve safety in infrastructure automation. So, we see 2022 as a banner year that allows a lot more people to experience the power of Digital Rebar.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Rob, thank you for sharing these, of course, predictions with us. As usual, I would love to have you back on the show next year to hear your predictions, not only for next year, but also check how many of your predictions turn out to be true. Thank you.

Rob Hirschfeld: Thanks.

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