Analyst firm Gartner has this week released its top 10 predictions for the IT industry in the next 3 years.
At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference, the firm announced details of what it believes will be the top 10 trends for IT infrastructure and operations for the coming years. Gartner believes every item in the list will have a significant impact on businesses in terms of disruption to productivity, the need to invest in new technology and the risk of adopting new technology too late. The firm hope the list will make businesses more aware of the growing trends in the IT industry and prompt them into looking into new technology before it’s too late.
“Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market,” commented Gartner’s vice president David Cearley.
Items listed in the top 10 and range from ‘Context Aware Computing‘ to ‘Storage Class Memory’. Topping the top 10 was ‘Cloud Computing’. Although often downplayed in the industry, Gartner believe cloud computing will take off in a big way in the next 3 years. The firm believe a number of key organisations will shift more of their services on to cloud services as data centres shrink in size and number in the coming 36 months.
Also featured in the list was ‘Green IT’. The research firm believe companies will look to invest in new ‘greener’ alternatives as global warming becomes a bigger issue. They warn businesses should look into alternative plans for data centres as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions and other environmental factors come under scrutiny.
Another entry into the top 10 was ‘Migration from Windows XP’. Support for Windows XP and Office 2003 ends in April 2014 and the research firm are urging businesses to make the move to a different operating system sooner rather than later. Other key items include ‘Flash Memory’, ‘Virtualisation’ and ‘Social Communications’.
The extensive list is as follows:
1. Cloud Computing
2. Advanced Analytics
3. Social Communications
4. Video
5. Social Analytics
6. Migration from Windows XP
7.Context Aware Computing
8. Flash Memory
9. Virtualisation for Availability
10. Fabric Computing
