Last year I did my first “Predictions for Next Year” post. I see a lot of these kinds of posts near the end of the year. I wanted to take things a step further and look back to see how well I did.

It is, of course, difficult for any of us to be completely objective about ourselves, so to help keep me honest, I’ll spell out the scoring methodology I’m using to rate the accuracy of my predictions. Additionally, I’m explicitly soliciting feedback. If you think I’ve scored myself in any of the categories incorrectly (either too high or too low), make your case in the comments.  If your reasoning is sound, I’ll adjust the score.

Scoring Methodology

I made predictions on four distinct topics. To rate my predictions’ overall accuracy on a scale of 0 to 100, I’ll rate the predictions for each topic on a 0 to 25, with 0 points if I was completely off-base, and 25 if I was completely dead-on accurate.

So, without further ado, let’s see how I did:

Storage Consolidation

I have to say it looks like I was pretty far off on this one. Not being content to simply predict that there would be consolidation in the storage industry, I went further and predicted “a large — perhaps even surprising — storage acquisition in 2016”.

Without that extreme prediction, I might have qualified for some partial credit when Cisco started pushing their new storage servers, but with it, I have to say I had a complete miss here.

STORAGE CONSOLIDATION SCORE: 0/25

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Convergence

I did better with this one, although not enough to get top marks.

2016 was the year that Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) became a very hot topic. Lots of folks were talking about HCI, and more new HCI or HCI-related solutions and bundles made an appearance.

However, once again I went further, and predicted an HCI acquisition. I can’t recall any such acquisition occurring in 2016, so I have to rule that the best I can hope for is 50% of the available points for this section.

My base premise was correct — HCI was hot this year — it just wasn’t as hot as I had predicted.

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE SCORE: 10/25

[UPDATE: It’s worth noting that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) waited until 17 January 2017 to announce that they’d entered into an agreement to acquire HCI vendor SimpliVity. I’m not saying that they delayed just to mess up my accuracy score. I’m just saying I had a near miss.]

Security Breaches in the Headlines

At first glance it would appear I was dead on with this one. During the months of the US Election, it seemed like you couldn’t go an hour without hearing about breaches. Were the election results changed because of hacking? I don’t know. Were those results affected by the hacking? Yeah, I’m pretty sure they were.

It wasn’t just the election, though. Yahoo recently announced that they’d been breached and that over 1 Billion accounts had been compromised. (That’s not a typo. The “B” shouldn’t be an “M”. One Billion accounts.)

But, once again, my prediction went more extreme — I claimed that this would be the year that the world would wake up from its collective numbness about data breaches and finally start taking security seriously.

Sadly, other than government agencies and law enforcement find more and more creative ways to skirt the laws that were explicitly designed to protect their citizens’ privacy, this simply doesn’t appear to have happened.

Apparently, it’s going to take an even bigger breach or disaster than has happened so far — or than I gave an example of — before the world will wake up on this.

SECURITY BREACH SCORE: 12/25

Social Media Normalization

I have to say the results are mixed on this one. On the one hand, more folks are just using social media as they go about their daily jobs. On the other hand, with more companies embracing social media as another way to reach customers, they’re looking for folks to fill positions  with titles like “Social Media Marketing”.

Overall, I think half points is fair.

SOCIAL MEDIA NORMALIZATION SCORE: 12/25

The Bottom Line

By the scoring used above, the “accuracy rating” of my 2016 predictions comes in at 34%.

Not particularly impressive, I admit.

Of course, I don’t really have a scale to compare this to. Do other bloggers or analysts do report cards like this on their predictions? Did I perform above, below, or just about the same as other predictors? I really don’t know.

What I do know is this: If I do a predictions post for 2017, I’m going to have to try to come in at better than 34% this time…