Big changes ahead?

I started noticing some game changing events/trends occurring. The thought of what these changes could lead to is leaving me pretty excited about the future. I wanted to share my thoughts and get feedback from colleagues. 

More and more homes and offices are being connected by fiber. WAN latencies are dropping and bandwidth is increasing. The last mile problem looks like it may disappear before the start of the next decade. 

3D X-Point technology is here now. It's not just an academic idea that works in the lab: mass manufacturing facilities have already started production. Flash 1000 times more dense, non-volatile and fast enough to be used as persistent main memory. This will undoubtedly combine with Open Channel SSD technology for direct application access to enhance and simplify data security for the data owner. The impact to data science and big data applications will be huge.

Intel SGX is already here with Skylake to provide hardware based code and memory isolation with SGX enclaves along with remote attestation. What's this mean? You can safely run your applications anywhere without breaking a sweat and know they're not at risk, at least in theory. If all the hype holds it could single handedly lead to cloud computing security nirvana.

Programmable logic for the datacenter went mainstream this week as Intel started to ship it's first FPGA packed Xeon Processors: https://goo.gl/AFajFJ.  Why? All the press out there says it's for cloud acceleration. Besides accelerating network and data IO functions this could be used by cloud platforms for better QoS guarantees in multi-tenant environments. If on demand provisioning is possible, software bottlenecks and new hardware functions can be introduced. The concept has been researched for years now at IBM's Liquid Metal Project.

There's probably a lot more that can be added to this list. What really excites me are the synergies across these technologies as these trends continue and where they'll lead us in terms of new opportunities.