Happy New Year! The end of a year is an opportune time to assess the previous year and make projections on the year to come. In the fall, Gartner revealed, as it does every year, a list of 10 trends in IT.
In turn, we have identified three major trends in IT in Canada that put a primary emphasis on the importance of technology as a business growth driver.
In 2015, hardware acquisitions will systematically take into account the benefits of cloud. The main motivation behind this new trend will be to reduce IT’s responsibility for the maintenance of the physical infrastructure environment, and build on a strategic partnership that provides the same requirements via IaaS / PaaS / SaaS services.
As computational resources are becoming increasingly a commodity, companies are seeking to reduce their investments in physical hardware and the cloud responds to this logic.
One of the secondary benefits of Cloud is capacity management: where conventional infrastructure is built on a hypothetical growth projection to ensure that needs are met until the next hardware refresh cycle ; Cloud has the advantage of limiting the investment to the capacity required immediately, and can fluctuate nimbly depending on changes in the business. In this way, the challenging exercise of requirements planning is minimized.
The shift to enterprise mobility is certainly essential for growth, yet there are some challenges. Not only is there a challenge of innovation to conceptualize the application (objectives, architecture, functionality ...) but there is also a challenge, both cultural and technological, to open the existing systems of the company and enable data sharing between the platform of the application and the back-end.
The companies that will thrive in 2015 with mobile applications will be those that manage to use mobile applications to collect, exploit, enrich and converge their data strategically. In many industries, such as retail, for example, the strategic decision to turn to mobility helps to draw the line between the most powerful players in the sector and those who are struggling.
The Software-Defined Data Center will have an important place in IT in 2015. This is a radical change from the long-established concepts in IT infrastructure. We experienced the same type of radical change with the introduction of virtualization in 2003, which changed the way we operate our computational resources. Now we are ready to see the next big wave: consolidation of storage services and networks as well as virtualization infrastructure under a unified operating platform.
A solution like Nutanix, which is classified as visionary by Gartner for this type of solution, offers the most advanced vision on IT ecosystems. Moreover, the market for these converged infrastructure solutions grew by 50% between 2013 and 2014.
Beyond technology trends, the change in attitudes in crucial on several aspects that are intrinsically linked to business growth in the all-digital era. Although it is difficult to estimate how many years these vision changes will take, what is already visible is the growing gap between the performance of the pioneers in the adoption of certain technological innovations, like everything related to mobility for example, and the companies that are slow to include IT in their growth strategy.
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