Human augmentation and wireless power devices will become $1 billion markets by 2020
With 2011 predicted to be the year when the IT industry will reach nearly $3.5 trillion in revenue and show long-term growth for the next five years, Gartner, Inc. analysts today presented business and IT issues that warrant the greatest attention and demand the clearest strategies for the future.
Gartner analysts examined the future directions of IT during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010.
“We are increasingly living, playing and working in a digital world where people will have no alternatives but to become ‘more digital’ with the assets they have available,” said Stephen Prentice, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “In 2012, the internet will be 75 times larger than it was in 2002, and if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world (after China and India). Device and data proliferation is also a reality that cannot be escaped. Smart devices will rise from 60 billion devices in 2010 to more than 200 billion in 2020.”
“Technology is no longer the preserve of the CIO,” said Ken McGee, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “It has become everyone’s property and everyone’s issue.”
With the IT industry on track to show a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4 per cent for the next five years, Gartner has identified seven business and IT issues that CIOs should act on during the next three years. “CIOs will need to begin implementing these technologies within three years to meet the six year predictions,” Mr McGee said. The seven issues include:
IT/OT Alignment – Inadequate software management of operational technology (OT) systems will result in a major business failure of a top Global 100 company by 2013.
Executives are realising there are cost savings and management efficiencies to be gained by integrating the IT and OT groups together. Although efforts to integrate groups are challenging, benefits from streamlined budgets, coordinated planning, consistent technology architectural decisions and maximising technology purchasing power make for extremely compelling cases for IT and OT group integration.
Business Gets Social – Through 2015, 80 per cent of organisations will lack a coherent approach for dealing with information from the collective.
Today, social media is changing the way business is conducted. “Understanding the power of communities, the multiple personas of their members expectations, their aspirations and how to interact with them will become essential skills for business in the 21st century,” said Mr McGee. “However, vast sums of money and enormous amounts of time will be spent during this decade and beyond to discover how IT and business leaders best capitalise on the growing spread, power and influence of social networks.”
Pattern-Based Strategy – Through 2015, pattern-seeking technology will be the fastest-growing intelligence investment among the most successful Global 2000.
A Pattern-Based Strategy provides a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators, often-termed “weak” signals that form patterns in the marketplace. It will allow IT leaders to seek-out patterns amidst the burgeoning information sources and model future possibilities. “We have found that senior business and IT leaders see lack of information shareability as a barrier to growth,” Mr Prentice said.
Cloud Computing – By 2016, all Global 2000 companies will use public cloud services.
Cloud computing represents a shift in the relationship between the providers and consumers of IT-based solutions. It constitutes the basis of a discontinuity that amounts to a new opportunity to shape the relationship between those who use IT services and those who sell them. Gartner said worldwide cloud services revenue (including public and private services) is forecast to reach $148.8 billion in 2014.
Context-Aware Computing – By 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.
Context-aware computing will foster people to be more digital with the assets they have available. Context-aware computing is taking advantage of location and time and is a new era of augmented reality. More than $150 billion of global telecom spending will shift from services to applications by 2012, and the global market for context-aware services will amount to $215 billion. “Unlocking this potential will be one of the next major challenges for IT,” said Mr McGee. “For example, we expect 75 per cent of new search installations to include a social search element. The world is digital and business leaders can’t ignore it.”
Sustainability – By 2016, sustainability will be the fastest-growing enterprise compliance expense worldwide.
As long as the current science surrounding climate change remains credible, organisations should anticipate that the current focus on energy, water and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will continue, and this will draw attention to other environmental issues, such as resource depletion, species extinction, bio-diversity and environmental justice. There will remain many hard trade-offs between an organisation’s financial and operational performance and that of its environmental performance. Information systems will be critical in the role — from governance, risk and compliance, through corporate social responsibility systems, to enabling new and more-sustainable business models.
New Realities of IT: Balancing Cost and Innovation with Risk and Governance – Innovation accomplishments will be among the top-three selection criteria for new CIOs by 2016.
With the recent global recession, innovative thinkers must find new ways to create growth — in revenue, jobs and industries — in this new business climate. Cost and value optimisation must remain a top priority, while the search for growth continues. Regulatory and corporate demands for greater attention to risk have already begun to emerge. Gartner also foresees a new emphasis on business change governance.
Future Trends
Beyond 2020, Gartner analysts forecast that two emerging trends will become $1 billion markets. First, human augmentation, a technology that focuses on creating cognitive and physical improvements as an integral part of the human body is slowly but steadily becoming a reality and enhancing peoples’ lives. The second trend is wireless power devices. By 2011, there will be more than 1 billion PCs and 5 billion mobile phones in use in the world, and based on the levels of demand Gartner foresees cumulative sales from wireless power products surpassing $1 billion by 2020.
“We are reaching these observations by exploring future IT growth and future adoption projections upon demand,” Mr McGee said. “We are looking at emerging business and societal trends and based upon our findings, we will indicate likely future IT winners and losers. This methodology will not replace any existing methodologies, but simply complement existing models.”
“Looking forward, we expect to see more deployment of existing technologies in new and innovative ways, and fewer and fewer genuinely new technologies emerging in the mainstream, ” said Mr Prentice. “That is not to imply that no new developments will occur, but we are now starting to see the early indications of precursor and trigger technologies for the next wave of technology, which is likely to run from about 2025 through 2080.”
