- Salice Thomas
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- April 20, 2013
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Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses or it can be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.
According to David Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow, “We have identified the top 10 technologies that will be strategic for most organizations, and that IT leaders should factor into their strategic planning processes over the next two years”. “This does not necessarily mean enterprises should adopt and invest in all of the listed technologies; however companies need to be making deliberate decisions about how they fit with their expected needs in the near future.” Following are the top 10 strategic technology trends
1. Mobile Device Battles
2. Mobile Applications and HTML5
3. Personal Cloud
4. Enterprise App Stores
5. The Internet of Things
6. Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
7. Strategic Big Data
8. Actionable Analytics
9. In Memory Computing
10. Integrated Ecosystems
Not surprisingly, the trends as revolving around the four converging forces say social, mobile, cloud and information. These forces together revolutionize business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders.
Mobile Device Battles
Gartner predicts that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device by 2013. Over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smart phone by 2015. Also tablet shipment will reach 50 percent of the laptop shipments by 2015. These trends clearly indicate the world will be connected many fold by 2015 and the data traffic will be very high which will promises high business growth for the organizations who invested in it. Windows 8 will likely replace Research In Motion(RIM) platform by 2015 and will be in 3rd position after IOS and Android.
Enterprises will need to support a greater variety of form factors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware. The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.
Mobile Applications and HTML5
Currently we have over 100 potential tools venders to create consumer and enterprise facing applications. For the next few years, enterprises cannot dependent on any single tool to support. The Six mobile architectures – native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular independent of platforms. As HTML5 become more capable and popular, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps. The browser will remains as a mainstream application developer environment. However the native applications won’t disappear and it will always provide the best user experience and most sophisticated features. The enterprises and architects have to develop new design skills to support optimized mobile applications that operate a range of devices and platforms.
Personal Cloud
As end users are more shifting towards mobile based connectivity and access anywhere become a daily necessity, the personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals center their digital lives.The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of their computing and communication activities. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate. The personal cloud shifts the organization focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices.
There will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. By 2014 By 2014. The Apple store development size itself is estimated to $10billion in 2012 and it is going at a pace of double. The app store future is very complex as some venders limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps. This forces enterprises to deal with multiple stores, payment process and licensing terms.By 2014, most organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support application entrepreneurs.
The Internet of Things
It is estimated that Over 50% of Internet connections are things. In 2011, over 15 billion things on the Web, with 50 billion+ intermittent connections. By 2020, over 30 billion connected things, with over 200 billion with intermittent connections.The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mobile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition technologies and NFC payment.Mobile no longer refers only to use of cellular handsets or tablets. Cellular technology is being embedded in many new types of devices including pharmaceutical containers and automobiles. Smartphones and other intelligent communicate via NFC, Bluetooth, LE and Wi-Fi to a wide range of devices and peripherals, such as wristwatch displays, healthcare sensors, smart posters, and home entertainment systems. The IoT will enable a wide range of new applications and services while raising many new challenges. The trend will enable a wide range of new applications and services for the entrepreneurs. By 2015, in more than 70% of enterprises, a single exec will oversee all Internet connected things. Becomes the Internet of Everything.
Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
Hybrid IT and cloud computing we have been talking about in oneway or another for about four years, but we continue to see evolution that makes it ever more important for enterprise to develop a strategic approach to it. IT departments must play multiple roles in coordinating IT-related activities, and cloud computing is now pushing that change to another level. A recently conducted Gartner IT services survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that, they have a responsibility to help improve the provisioning and consumption of cloud services for their internal users and external business partners. The internal CSB role represents a means for the IT organization to retain and build influence inside its organization and to become a value center in the face of challenging new requirements.
Strategic Big Data
Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches. The concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions is over. The key thing here is companies moving beyond single, big data projects. Multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata, will become the “logical” enterprise data warehouse.
Actionable Analytics
We have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs that we can afford to perform analytics and simulation for each and every action taken in the business. Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. Apart from data center applications, mobile devices will have access to data and analytic engine, which will have enough capability to perform analytics themselves, potentially enabling use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.
In Memory Computing
In memory computing (IMC), Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tens of millisecond to detect correlations and patterns pointing at emerging opportunities and threats “as things happen”. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services. Many enterprises will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.
Integrated Ecosystems
This trend is driven by the user desire for lower cost, simplicity,and more assured security. The market is shifting away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches to more integrated systems and ecosystems. Driving the trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware. The trend is manifested in three levels. Appliances combine hardware and software and software and services are packaged to address and infrastructure or application workload. Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a foundation for ISV development and application runtime. In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem.
