During a year of increased awareness and adoption, cloud computing has demonstrated it can meet the demand for improved IT efficiency through a virtualized, secure infrastructure solution that is both scalable and reliable. IT analysts and industry experts expect the continued evolution of cloud computing to remain among the most important technology trends in 2011.
Gartner Inc. predicts global sales of cloud services to reach $148.8 billion by the end of 2014, up from $68 billion in 2010. A key to the growing cloud market is the ROI an organization can realize. More and more organizations of all sizes are looking to get out of the business of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure.
“The core ideas at the heart of cloud computing — such as pay for use, multi-tenancy and external services — appear to be resonating more strongly,” said Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner. “In part, this can be explained by macroeconomic factors. The financial turbulence of the last 18 months has meant every organization has been scrutinizing every expenditure. An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility is hard to ignore against this backdrop.” Other key trends that could define the IT landscape in 2011 include:
These networks — comprising ultra-wideband capacity, "super" data centers for the cloud and smart devices for anywhere, personalized applications — will become the springboard for a new decade of innovation. Businesses that have learned to do more with less over the past several years will increasingly harness the power of high IQ networks for the most inventive, efficient and cost-effective platform for success. They will look to private, public and hybrid clouds for new delivery models and move to more industry-specific solutions to get the most for their money.
Smarter, more portable devices combined with fourth-generation wireless networks, advanced mobile enterprise application platforms and an increased demand for workforce mobility will make mobile business apps more attractive and popular. A thin-client approach, in which applications are stored and delivered from the cloud, is helping to make it more practical to “mobilize” applications for today's on-the-go workforce. More powerful devices, backed by huge libraries of applications and large developer communities, will help businesses capitalize on mobile broadband networks.
The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.
Video will be among the most engaging business applications to take advantage of higher-capacity wireless networks for face-to-face and face-to-machine interaction. Just as telepresence, high-definition desktop video units and Web-based video have become common in business meetings, video will become an essential tool for workers everywhere. It will be used, for example, by doctors to view X-rays that were taken hundreds of miles away, or manufacturers calling on faraway experts to diagnose challenges on an assembly line. New business models will evolve to monetize digital content and deliver video across multiple screens, a development that is reshaping how we interact with video at work, home and on the go.
Beneath the service of all the cool apps we employ to engage with each other, a plethora of machines will continue to run in the background, initiating and responding automatically to the business at hand. Employed in applications as diverse as meter reading for utilities, patient monitoring in healthcare and wireless connectivity for devices in automobiles, machine to machine (M2M) communications will make the world we live in more intuitive and efficient.
As communications channels integrate, businesses are turning to unified communications technologies to make collaboration easier by bringing together a myriad of communication platforms — such as IM, chat, click-to-call, video and VoIP calls — into one central system. With the advent of cloud-based subscription models, smaller businesses will find a way to adopt these technologies to speed their operations. As a younger working population demands “social collaboration,” companies need to deliver the business-grade tools to empower employees to be more responsive and engaged with each other and with customers.
According to the four international non-profit groups that collaboratively work to coordinate the world’s Internet addressing system, the last remaining IPv4 addresses were allocated in February. Organizations need to plan now to ensure that e-mail, Web and business applications will be accessible via both protocols. Global network service providers, private industry and the public sector will all need to work together to ensure that Web sites can be reached, and that the Internet supports business as usual during the transition to the next-generation Internet protocol, IPv6.
Increasing computer processing power along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward-looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real time to support individual business actions. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.
