The pace at which information technology changes today is greater than ever. The emergence of smart phones and smart devices, app economy is increasing steadily with more and more companies mobilizing their workforce to enhance productivity and better results. Experts from around the world are betting big on business intelligence tools, cloud based applications and security management to dominate in the upcoming years. Vice President of Gartner, David Cearley says that Enterprises will need to invest capital to improve network capacity and reliability. They will also need to improve wireless governance to improve wireless manageability and service levels. In addition, the annual presentation of Gartner’s popular Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends unveils the key IT trends for 2012.
[1] Bring-your-own-technology at work will be a common concept, as it will enhance the productivity of the employees due to their comfort level with the technology they have adapted. So, businesses will focus more on security and management to ensure seamless access to applications through various devices.
[2] Mobile-centric applications and interfaces that enable touch, gesture and voice recognition will start dominating the market. Applications like “Siri”, which has perfect voice recognition and response will start evolving and will become users’ favorite as it makes life easier.
[3] Context aware computing will start emerging through effective usage of environment related data, activities, network connections and preferences of the end user. A contextually aware system predicts the needs of the user and serves appropriately.
[4] Consumer driven app development through enterprise application stores will let IT manage and control specific apps. Enterprises will have to focus on managing diversity to develop different apps and should concentrate on app architectures that are customizable as per needs.
[5] Internet of things will be prevalent and cameras, sensors, microphones, voice and image recognition - is part of the environment and are also connected to Internet. Major IT corporations are already involved in developing unified management systems to handle these devices remotely.
[6] Next-gen analytics to analyze and simulate almost every action taken in business is on the rise. Apart from data center systems, mobile devices will also be capable of performing complex analytical calculations and thus ensures collaborative decision making on the move.
[7] Companies are working rigorously to manage and store huge volumes of data. Popularly termed as ‘Big data’, there are new techniques to handle them and companies are developing new skills to effectively use these techniques.
[8] In-memory computing through usage of flash memory will be popular in consumer devices, entertainment devices, equipment and other embedded IT systems. A new layer of memory hierarchy in servers and client systems will have space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them.
[9] Energy efficient servers will be sought-after much owing to the increasing energy costs as a result of diminishing natural resources. New processes and technologies will help next generation servers to consume very less power without reduction in performance.
[10] ‘The Collective’ made up of individuals, groups, communities, mobs, markets and firms, will decide the future of different societies and businesses. The collective, also termed as collective intelligence is nothing new, but technology and networking have made it extremely powerful impacting business operations and strategies in a strong manner.
