Coming year promises new tech trends in IT

Enterprises, long used to running elaborately customised on-premise applications, are now facing tantalising choices.  The buzz on cloud continues to be deafening, tools inspired by social networks are seeping into the enterprise domain, a new generation of devices led by mobile phones have emerged demanding access to applications. There is rising noise on exotic sounding technologies such as context-aware applications, fabric-based computing and advanced analytics.
 
The perpetual buzz on the Next Big Thing is perhaps the only constant in the IT industry. After margins, it is the hype this industry loves most. Goaded by vendors, always seeking new marketing pitch to sell their products, along with generous help from analysts and media, the industry hops from one trendy tech to another.

It is often hard to tell fact from the fluff. The most promising technologies which make a lot of strategic sense may peter out. They either move into oblivion or continue to lead a low-key but fruitful existence. A few years ago, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) sounded like an idea whose time had come. The promise to address the age-old woes of the IT industry, which is straddled with incompatible infrastructure and applications, was tempting. But after widespread engagement there are doubts on whether SOA achieved what it set out to - to turn applications into seamless services.

Last year, analyst firm Gartner assigned a key position to Green IT as a major emerging technology, a logical choice given the unfolding energy crisis and the high energy-guzzling nature of IT. But in this year’s list of Gartner’s emerging technologies list, Green IT finds no mention. 

So, CIOs may be excused for treating all talk of emerging technologies as hype. But again, a wrong bet, a failure to spot a true game changer may cost their jobs. At a recent meet in Mumbai, Gartner analysts shared with Deccan Herald an interesting list of technology trends for enterprises.

However, there are a few technologies in the list that merit serious consideration. These have strong fundamentals, promise to address widespread pain-points and may usher in higher productivity.  They are culminations of technologies which have evolved over last two to three decades.

Cloud Computing: Reality bites 

The technology, which helps companies break the shackles of on-premise infrastructure, software and applications, is being touted as the most significant breakthrough in IT in the last few decades. The idea of sharing IT assets in a scalable, on-demand fashion has obvious merit in an industry straddled with underutilised resources.

Vendors who have invested heavily in different layers of the Cloud stack - infrastructure, platform, applications and services — are pushing for it aggressively. But are the customers biting, particularly in India? Not yet.

Indian companies

Indian companies have traditionally underinvested in IT and are now making up for it. For them cloud is an attractive proposition. Microsoft’s Senior Vice-President Amitabh Srivastava says Indian firms can take a different route from their global peers in building infrastructure and move to Cloud directly skipping phases such as virtualisation.

But SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka says IT has always been heterogeneous and will continue to be so. On-premise applications will coexist with on-demand services but will come under pressure to connect work with all other systems in an enterprise. Companies will continue to invest in on-premise infrastructure and may run up to 15 percent of their apps on Clouds, in the next five years, he says. 

But cloud may find the going tough particularly in India. The demanding Indian CIOs of large enterprises are yet to see the business sense in the cloud, says Gartner Research vice-president Rakesh Kumar.

Despite the teething problem, most experts agree that 10 years from now the enterprise focus will substantially shift from on-premise to cloud computing. Gartner senior vice-president Peter Sondergaard says cloud would restructure businesses the way Internet disrupted the music industry. The consumer-facing industries with significant service component such as insurance and banking would be prime candidates for disruption, he adds.

For cloud to move forward in India as elsewhere, it has to build confidence in CIOs to put their data on third party servers. It has to resolve governance and compliance issues as well. But even for those CIOs who remain sceptical of all hypes here is a trend to note seriously.

Mobiles and Tablets: App stores for employees

The march of the mobiles is unstoppable. Mobile internet would overtake fixed internet in the next five years, according to Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley analyst. Gartner vice-president Stephen Prentice says for the first time in September 2010 mobile data traffic exceeded mobile voice traffic.

As enterprise users start demanding mobile access to applications, CIOs besides re-architecting their existing solutions would also need to worry about security and governance implications of unleashing sensitive corporate data.

Mobiles open up another avenue for consumer technology trends to seep into enterprises. With app stores becoming rage, analysts say even enterprise customers would eventually demand CIOs to provide them a suite of applications to meet their different needs.

The fast proliferating tablets are another device on CIOs’ radar. Prentice says email is the killer application of tablets, which offer instant access to inbox and bigger screens to view.  What is true of emails will hold good for other apps.

Social media:  Gaining momentum

The Indian user base of social media is low but growing exponentially. Mobiles powered by 3G are expected to propel social media into mainstream in enterprises. Gartner research director Mary Mesaglio says Indian CIOs are highly interested in social media and figuring out how to use it.

Companies are using social media to offer customer service, recruit or retain employees and generate sales leads. Many consumer-facing companies in aviation, finance and consumer goods are leading the way. Paul Writer CEO Jessie Paul says 75 per cent of top 500 Indian enterprises have some sort of social media initiatives, but are yet to realise any real value from them.

Current enterprise social media initiatives fall into two groups. There are internal efforts, led by CIOs, to offer social media tools to employees inside the firewall. Paul says many of the internal deployments have come about under pressure from employees. CIOs have to also find solutions to listen to the chatter about their companies on social networks and pipe them back as actionable feedback.

Then there are outbound initiatives to reach out to customers or potential employees on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These activities are led by non-IT departments such as marketing or HR. As social media gains momentum there is a possibility of different departments doing their own thing, sidelining CIOs and even putting company data and confidentiality at risk.

CIOs have the unenviable task of both driving the deployment of social media tools with in enterprise and helping their companies evolve governance and data sharing policies. 

Buzz around other technologies

There are a few other trends of interest for CIOs.
Video - Videos contains much more data than text-based documents and are reportedly poised for a dramatic leap. By 2012, more than 9 per cent of Internet traffic is expected come from video, audio, and photos.  CIOs will have to stretch their infrastructure to manage video content from several sources — CXO casts, e-learning, research, sales and marketing, webinar and telepresence.

Context-aware computing - In the next 10 years, 50 billion everyday objects would be connected to the web, say researchers. The coming era of ‘Internet of things’ would help enterprises gain unprecedented insight into human behaviour. As a customer walks in, a store would be able to offer products based on her previous buying behaviour.  Indian companies like Infosys are betting on integrated sensor technologies which are expected to grow exponentially. Infy CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan says the potential market is worth billions of dollars.

Pattern-based analysis - Information is the oil of this century and companies will mine structured and unstructured data using advanced analytics to get real-time insights and even build predictive models. 

Storage Class Memory - Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems.

Fabric-based computing consists of loosely coupled storage, networking and processing devices linked together by high-speed bandwidth. Enterprises would be able to aggregate high performance systems on the fly from these building blocks.
Many of these technologies represent strong trends backed by powerful vendors of the IT industry. It is again an open question on how many of them will eventually strike deep roots. It takes an intelligent CIO to tell the fact from the fluff.