It's the start of the new year, and the first day of work for many of us. As I start to work this year, I see that much of my work is based on that planning we did at the end of last year. We made predictions for our business, set goals, and today begin to execute on things. However, we are assuming our predictions are somewhat accurate in order to achieve success. What if our predictions aren't correct?

There's no shortage of prognosticators out there, and I found a number of predictions about IT, the Cloud, and Microsoft. I have no idea if any of these will actually come true, but I wanted to ask you this week:

Which of these predictions will come true in 2015?

• Increased automation and less staff
• more BYOD acceptance and support
• More telecommuting
• containerization of software in the cloud (or the data center)
• More hybrid applications using the cloud
• IoT growth - more sensors, more data for you
• Windows 10 will be a hit
• SQL Server 2015 will come out
• Windows Phone will become competitive
• You'll get hacked at your company.
• You will encrypt your databases?

The IT trends listed are fairly general, and all of them are really underway now, so I'm not sure there's much of a prediction there. For you individually, will you see more automation and less people? More BI and cloud usage? Any of the Microsoft predictions likely to come true? Do any these apply to your environment?

This isn't an exhaustive list, and certainly there's lots of people expecting 3D printing and more mobile technologies to emerge. If you think any of these will, or won't, definitely come true, take a vote and we'll rerun this thread at the end of the year. If you have other predictions, let us know as well.