My take on Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015

As open source vendors like Red Hat, OpenStack, Hortonworks etc as well as foundations (OpenStack etc) help customers achieve their key business transformation initiatives through open architectures and technologies, customers should place a close eye on emerging technologies and trends as they happen.

But what comes next and what is to be expected?

Gartner top 10 trends offers a compelling look at these very important potential shifts in the IT landscape and their seismic impact on customer organizations.

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2867917

Here is an independent (and open source) & hopefully succinct take on each of these –

1.Computing Everywhere

It is not just about serving these transient visitors across a business context, we feel that business architectures built in support of Mobile devices should also support the building of relationships with them. We increasingly see a number of customers supporting a BYOD model where mobile apps now serve as a replacement for web applications. Security,User interface design & business workflow support will emerge as key drivers from a business side. IT will focus on the ability of such architectures to support multiple cloud deployment backends.

2.Internet of Things

From an enterprise perspective, IoT has the potential to turn any organization into an Enterprise Internet of Things. We recommend that customers not only think about IoT soley in the context of smart home appliances and wearable fitness devices etc buts also about the ramifications of the changes to existing and potentially new complex application architectures run by most enterprises.

If IoT isn’t already viewed as a “must-have” by business stakeholders, chances are it won’t be long before customer IT organizations are tasked with identifying and harnessing information and actionable insight from Internet-connected devices.

The true value of Internet-connected devices lies in harnessing all the data they produce to provide insights into how the business is working – so that existing business models can be fine-tuned or even new ones created. This is typically done by developing applications that can glean insights from the data and providing it to business stakeholders and customers through dashboards. As a first step to designing an IoT strategy for your enterprise, start by identifying the areas of your business that would be a natural fit from a revenue generation or customer engagement perspective.

3. 3D Printing

We forecast that will be an interesting space to watch as more financing and funding goes into players in the 3D printing market. We expect this to only mature, evolve into supporting many different kinds of manufacturing products as cost of materials falls & more diverse products produced.This eventually this will lead to sea changes in the manufacturing industry with impacts for industrial automation.

4. Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics

As mobile clients, IoT applications, social media feeds etc are being brought oboard into existing applications from an analytics perspective, traditional IT operations face pressures from both business and development teams to provide new and innovative services in response to rapidly changing business requirements and the need for real-time responsiveness.Data streams need to be filtered and acted in appropriate context from an analytical perspective. Analytics is the first killer app for Big Data. Be it the low hanging fruit of reporting & dashboards to forecasting and predictive modeling and even Data Science. One of the biggest trends for 2014, is the enhancement of analytic capabilities to incorporate real streams of data at a humongous scale. Existing applications can now incorporate such functionality to derive real time meaning from this data.

5. Context-Rich Systems

We feel that context will be the critical piece as enterprise architectures ingest, transform and analyse new age data streams whether they are IoT or mobile device or social media related. Cross cutting concerns like security,workflow and business policies will all need to be baked in and supplied as part of the overall context of the data-flow.

6.Smart Machines

Smart machines like robots,personal helpers,automated home equipment will rapidly evolve as algorithms get more capable and understanding of their own environments. In addition, Big Data & Cloud computing will continue to mature and offer day to day capabilities around systems that employ machine learning to make predictions & decisions. We will see increased application of smart machines in diverse fields like financial services,healthcare, telecom and media.

7.Cloud/Client Computing

Cloud Computing will play an increasing role in the life cycle of development, deployment and optimization of computing applications.As mobile clients proliferate,the trend will be in favor of applications that use robust MBaaS technologies to maximize application performance and provide an ability to synchronize data efficiently across between devices and cloud computing backends.

8.Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure

Innovation in the industry is often shackled by the absence of a responsive, automated,efficient and agile infrastructure. It can take days to procure servers to host bursts of workloads that may not be feasible for existing IT departments to rapidly turn around. We will witness the further rise of application controlled compute,network and storage.Further, Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) which beginning to provide orchestration capabilities by means of workload portability around public and private clouds will find increased adoption.

9.Web-Scale IT

Web-scale IT has already proven its mettle at large cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook and others and is now making its way into enterprises. Webscale IT in the enterprise will find adoption via technologies like OpenStack, Platform As A Service(PaaS) and DevOps, a software development philosophy & methodology that emphasises communication, collaboration and integration between development and operations. This trend towards adopting web scale practices, is definitely taking hold in IT organizations that want to be nimble and effective, will be driven by Open Source.

10.Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection

As cybercrime attacks increase in scale, notoriety and sophistication, security will clearly emerge as a cross cutting concern in any technology implementation. Broadly identifying every potential attack vector, enforcing realtime intelligence & deep learning around these while keeping the overall business context in mind will be one of the key approaches in keeping data & systems secure.

All said and done, these are disruptive (and exciting times) for enterprise IT and open source in particular. In follow-on posts, we will examine how these trends are rippling across the financial services industry both from a business solution & technology platform perspective.