From software innovations to historic partnerships, 2018 was a landmark year for tech. The industry saw a new wave of enterprise modernization as the market began to find its footing in a hybrid computing world, as well as a significant shift away from legacy processes among veteran information technology support leaders.

With 100 tech shows and events filmed by theCUBE in 2018, as well as more than 2,000 interviews by SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s theCUBE hosts last year, Stu Miniman (@stu, pictured), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, spoke with Sam Kahane (@Sam_Kahane), director of business development at SiliconANGLE, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed Miniman’s key takeaways from 2018 and what to expect in the year to come.

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

What surprised you the most this year?

Miniman: We had the largest software acquisition in tech history, IBM buying Red Hat for $34 billion. Red Hat has been the poster child for open source. We’ve been talking for a long time [about] how important developers are, how important open source is, and there’s nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars to validate how important this is to the future.

The big one is Amazon. [Of] the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, Amazon is number one. But you need to take number two through 43 and add them together to make them as big as Amazon. In Boston, there’s a new facility going up with 5,000 employees, 25,000 in New York City, as well as Crystal City outside of D.C., 25,000. Amazon’s going to have data centers in pretty much every country and employees all around the world.

What are some of the hottest topics you’re hearing out there?

Miniman: We know it will be a multicloud world. [In] 2018, we’ve gone from “how do I live in those public clouds” to “how are we maturing?” We saw the rise in Kubernetes as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and that is a serious challenge. How are the suppliers, communities, and systems integrations helping customers with this challenging new environment?

Cisco [is] going through this massive transformation to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That’s massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. If Cisco is making that change, everything changes.

Robotic process automation, or RPA, [has] been called the gateway drug to AI. [Before], you could get a process to around 97 to 98 percent compliance, but when they put in RPA, they get like 99.999 percent. Humans can’t take the variation out of a process — this has been the promise of automation. With the advent of AI machine learning, the programming and learning models that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are poised to take the industry to the next level.

Anything else to know about 2018?

Miniman: We talked about Amazon, but VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership is interesting. The warning is that Amazon is learning a lot from VMware, and maybe [they] don’t need them in the long term. But in the short term, great move for VMware. They’ve solidified their position with customers in that multicloud environment.

Users [are] just figuring out their digital transformation. They’re worried about their business. Put in the public cloud, what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift; it’s not the answer. Serverless is phenomenal. It could disrupt everything we’re talking about, and Amazon has the lead there.

Things are changing all the time, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. Some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies [are] like, “I can’t keep up with what’s going on at my company, let alone what’s going on in the industry.” The only constant in the industry is change.

What’s your number one company to watch this upcoming year?

Miniman: Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. [But] in the cloud space it is not only Amazon’s world. Microsoft’s super impressive. They focus on business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards [software as a service] in a big way. Google. Nutanix, they have over a billion in revenue.

The cloud is really the center of gravity. The whole [internet of things] space and edge computing, really interesting. Autonomous vehicles — will it really start to accelerate, or have we hit roadblocks?

Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions, big mergers and acquisitions you see?

Miniman: A couple of years ago Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. Dell’s going public December 28. Interesting move. Michael Dell is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and overall looks good for the Dell technologies family. So that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, we’re probably going to see a $10-to-20-billion acquisition this year. There’s a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon.

Customers are looking for a change in how they’re doing things, because their environments are changing. They’ve got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. There is some hesitancy in the enterprise — we hear about Facebook giving data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data. There’s that concern to pull things back, [but] the public clouds are more secure than my data centers are in general, and they’re changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest sins we have in IT is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change is the only constant.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE