‘Tis the season for peering into the crystal ball—and in the realm of industry—it’s time for the annual Gartner strategic technologies prediction. Earlier this week in a Gartner Symposium IT Expo session, analysts spelled out 10 strategic technology trends that they say will have significant impact on IT in 2013. It’s worth reviewing. If you look back to the predictions for 2012, their insights were right on the mark.
The 2013 Top 10 list includes:
- Mobile Devices Battles
- Mobile Applications & HTML5
- Personal Cloud
- Internet of Things
- Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
- Strategic Big Data
- Actionable Analytics
- Mainstream In-Memory Computing
- Integrated Ecosystems
- Enterprise App Stores
Eric Savitz from Forbes elaborated on the hybrid IT and cloud computing point: “Gartner thinks private clouds improve agility and will dominate. People are looking at the cloud as a way to accelerate business growth, particularly mobile apps. You could end up with [a] hybrid environment with dozens of specialty providers. It’s about increasing capability and/or capacity. You can move non-critical work to the cloud to free up space. Result can be incremental operating expense growth, but long-term capital spending deferral.”
I asked Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Skytap, for his thoughts on the same hybrid IT topic:
“Cloud computing is becoming a powerful new tool in the enterprise IT arsenal. But unlike a lot of the tools IT has used in the past (e.g., hardware, software, servers, storage, networking gear), cloud computing is delivered as an ongoing software-as-a-service that IT needs to coordinate and manage, but not necessarily architect, build, and run themselves in-house. Since no single tool is right for every job—IT will play a key role in identifying which IT applications and workloads are best suited to move to cloud computing, and which applications and workloads are best suited to run in-house. This hybrid IT approach—where in-house capabilities are augmented by external cloud computing—will become a dominant paradigm in enterprise IT in the coming years.”
If you’d like to discuss hybrid IT and cloud computing with our team, visit the Skytap booth at the Agile Dev East/Better Software Conference, SharePoint Conference 2012, or Gartner Application Architecture Development and Integration Summit in November.
You can also get in touch with one of our Skytap Cloud experts. And be sure to follow us on Twitter @Skytap and on LinkedIn.
