Gurus Of Tech On The Next Big Thing In 2012

If you are waiting for the gurus of tech to foretell ‘The’ next big thing in 2012, you might be in for some disappointment. Not because there is nothing of significance. On the contrary, analysts warn CIOs to brace themselves for an action-packed year ahead.

Betting On Cumulative Impact

2011 was a tumultuous year, with the only constant being change. A year of ups and downs, highs and lows for technology, 2011 saw a number of events, incidents, trends and developments that challenged the very fundamentals and paradigms of IT-as-we-know-it with the proliferation of ‘Everything-as-a-Service’.

For 2012, analysts are betting on a combination of three-four technology areas cumulatively to define the year 2012, with ‘cloud’, ‘mobile’, ‘social’, and ‘Big Data’ making it to those technology areas for most analysts. “There is a fairly recursive relationship between the four technologies. It’s not one independent of the other, but really the combined effect of the four technologies that will be the big thing to watch out for in 2012. I loosely call this Exo-IT, wherein for the first time, external forces – the customers, stakeholders – and being to leverage these forces through technology will be the key enabler for the business,” says Partha Iyengar, VP, Distinguished Analyst and Regional Research Director, India for Gartner.

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For Partha Kundu, Executive Director, PwC India, mobility, cloud computing, BI, and social media will play a key role in scripting the technology trends for 2012. He opines that this combination of cloud, social computing and mobility would be further leveraged to increase the productivity of the virtual workforce as more and more users expect to get access to personal, work, business applications and data from any device, anytime and anywhere.

However, the challenge is that organisations must respond to all these demands while balancing between access and security in order to meet the increased expectations of individuals. “The CIO must strike a balance between access and security. Data security becomes more crucial for the organisation as more and more IT users are mobile, accessing information over a number of computing environments. The priority for CIOs in 2012 will be to transport and deliver data in a secure environment, complying with organisation’s security norms,” says Kundu.

Cloud: Bring It On

According to Frost & Sullivan, cloud computing in 2012 is set to become mainstream in the Asia Pacific region. As per a report by KPMG International, the vast majority of senior executives globally say their organisations have already moved at least some business activities to the cloud and expect 2012 investment to skyrocket. Some companies plan to spend more than a fifth of their IT budget on cloud in 2012. This global scenario will find resonance in India as well.

“Cloud computing is expected to be a key driver of net new IT spending over the next five years as public cloud service providers and the adopters of private cloud environments invest in the supporting infrastructure,” says Kundu.

Big Data Gets Bigger

In 2011, companies didn’t really grapple with Big Data and have just skimmed the surface with running a few pilots. Big Data is becoming more relevant now as customers interact on mobile phones and tablets, the notion of how data is consumed has changed dramatically. Internally also, with BI and analytics, companies have to deal with enormous amounts of data coming in from all directions. And the mobile, social and cloud boom is only adding to unstructured data woes. “Unless companies have a cohesive integrated strategy, the information overload problem is going to be a mammoth issue in 2012,” warns Iyengar.

Analysts at Frost & Sullivan see Big Data and Analytics reaching the chasm in 2012 and getting deployed through variety of platforms. This, according to them, will be enabled by emerging technologies. But, informs IDC, the variables and models for Big Data analytics are likely to be entirely new, requiring new analyst skill sets, and the Chief Data Scientist will emerge in 2012 as a job title to help organisations define their “Big Data” strategies.

BI/Analytics: Analyse This

A Gartner survey shows that “improved decision-making” is the top driver of BI purchases. Capabilities that will evolve BI from an information delivery system to a decision platform will increase the value of BI and drive its growth and adoption in 2012.

“Real-time business intelligence and predictive analysis will be required not only for faster decision-making, but to cope with unexpected market risks and opportunities,” believes Kundu.

The BYOD Brigade Comes Marching In

Analysts at IDC expect organisations to start creating new workspace architectures built around mobility, cloud and data services in 2012. Consumerisation has created new demands on the work environment and IDC expects organisations to use desktop refreshes, green field deployments and remote/small site operations as opportunities to pilot new mobile services and solutions in 2012.

A major factor fuelling BYOD growth, believes IDC, is the fact that the shipment of smartphones is expected to exceed the shipment of PCs worldwide in 2012, a milestone that is most likely never going to be reversed.

With ‘combined forces coming IT’s way’ being flavour of the season, any organisation that wishes to excel in 2012 must establish in itself a significant discipline of coordinating distributed activities, advises a Gartner report. It says that organisations should establish relationship management as a key skill, and train its people accordingly. The reason for this is that the lack of control can only be combated through coordinative activities. The IT organisation of the future must coordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT.