ORLANDO---Corporate information technology departments will face
common problems over the next five years---agility, budget crunches and
the need to innovate---but at a scale they just haven't had to deal with
until now. That's a high-level takeaway from a Gartner overview at its Symposium powwow. Gartner analyst David Cappuccio ran through the research firm's top
10 technologies CIOs will have to worry about over the next five years.
The trends surfaced are a followup to Gartner's earlier keynote.
Here's a look the 10 issues and my take on them.
By organizational entrenchments and disruption, Gartner is referring
to vendors as well as IT. One prediction is that 30 percent of companies
using software as a service will switch to on-premises applications due
to poor service levels by 2014. Also by 2014, market consolidation will
nuke 20 percent of the top 100 IT service providers.
As far as the IT department, service levels also matter. IT support
will have to show usefulness or it'll simply go away. Customer
experience will determine whether the IT department lives on and agility
will matter as development times shorten.
Gartner's No. 2---software defined networks seems like a bandwagon
pick in some respects. Isn't everyone since VMware's acquisition of
Nicira talking software defined networks now? The argument that SDNs
will impact IT is that data center operations will change along with
workloads and application requirements.
The big data issue for IT has been covered repeatedly. Gartner's
biggest highlight revolves around managing storage growth and getting a
handle on requirements between now and 2015. The talent shortage will be
painful. Gartner estimates that big data demand will generate 1 million
jobs in the global 1000, but only a third of them will be filled.
For No. 4, Gartner's pitch about the hybrid data center is on target.
The reality is that commodity services will go cloud, but no one is
going to ditch the infrastructure they already have.
As for Gartner's client-server disruption argument it noted that 90
percent of enterprises will skip Windows 8 and client server
technologies will be a grab bag. That prediction isn't much of a stretch
given many companies are still going Windows 7. For more on this
Windows upgrade cycle, see Ed Bott's history lesson on enterprises and Microsoft's latest OSes.
The Internet of things is a technology that I would have put higher
from a business model perspective. Sensor data and smart objects affects
many other areas---including big data management.
Regarding No. 7, the move to appliances as a cure-all has been well
underway. What's interesting here is Gartner's argument that virtual
appliances will alter the equation. Will virtual appliances render all
those physical appliances (Exadata, Netezza etc.) moot?
On operational complexity, Gartner's takeaway was that employee owned
devices will be compromised by malware more than double the rate of
corporate-owned devices. Welcome to the BYOD headache. IT is paying for
more technology than it actually uses---20 percent of features and
functions in a system are used. Operational complexity will always be an
issue. The fix is elusive.
For No. 9, virtual data centers will mean staff shifts and force
innovation. The vertical organizations in corporate IT won't work going
forward.
And finally, IT demand will be insatiable. Adding capacity won't work
and corporations won't control most of the demand via apps, social
networks and other things. Key issue: By 2017, 40 percent of enterprise
contact information will be leaked into Facebook via mobile devices.
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