The top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most
organizations in 2013, presented during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for
significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors
that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption
to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the
risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured
and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also 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. These technologies impact the
organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.
“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,” said David
Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow. “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.”
Cearley said that these technologies are emerging amidst a nexus of
converging forces - social, mobile, cloud and information. Although
these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they
are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models
and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of
the technology platform of the future.
The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 include:
Mobile Device Battles
Gartner predicts that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the
most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 percent
of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. However,
only 20 percent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones. By
2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop
shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s
Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s big
bet and Windows 8 platform styles should be evaluated to get a better
idea of how they might perform in real-world environments as well as how
users will respond.
Consumerization will mean enterprises won't be able to force users to
give up their iPads or prevent the use of Windows 8 to the extent
consumers adopt consumer targeted Windows 8 devices. 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
The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is
complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. Currently, Gartner
separates mobile development tools into several categories. For the next
few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile
application so expect to employ several. Six mobile architectures –
native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain
popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps
to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable.
Nevertheless, native apps won't disappear, and will always offer the
best user experiences and most sophisticated features. Developers will
also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-optimized mobile
applications that operate across a range of devices in a coordinated
fashion.
Personal Cloud
The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location
where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and
personal preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the
glue that connects the web of devices they choose to use during
different aspects of their daily 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. Users will see it as a portable,
always-available place where they go for all their digital needs.
In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will
dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an
imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device
to cloud-based services delivered across devices.
Enterprise App Stores
Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will
limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the
enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple payment processes and
multiple sets of licensing terms.
By 2014, Gartner believes that many 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 apptrepreneurs.
The Internet of Things
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.
As a result, 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 devices don't just use the cellular network, they
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.
Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
As staffs have been asked to do more with less, 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 inherently distributed,
heterogeneous and often complex 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 relative to increasing adoption of cloud as an approach to
IT consumption.
Big Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an
influence on enterprises’ strategic information architecture. Dealing
with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to
many traditional approaches. This realization is leading organizations
to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing
all information needed for decisions. Instead they are moving towards
multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data
marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and
metadata, which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse.
Actionable Analytics
Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action
and in context. With the improvement of performance and costs, IT
leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action
taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic
engines and big data repositories potentially enables 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) can also provide transformational
opportunities. 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. 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 possibility
of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications
against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business
innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over
the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.
Integrated Ecosystems
The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and
ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches.
Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and
more assured security. 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 extending the client through the apps.
