Source : Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013
Gartner released their Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends of 2013. Here’s my insight on the relation / impact towards the Benelux market.
Mobile Device Battles
This battle will continue! Where it used to be Apple versus Google… We now see Microsoft coming up with a competitive offering. Here my opinion is that the true battle for the Benelux enterprise market lies between Apple and Microsoft.
Mobile Applications and HTML5
When one takes a look at the “App Stores”, “App Markets”, etc… You’ll notice that most “apps” are mostly frameworks to connect to back-end web services. This way the providers can reuse a lot of their logic for different clients. So I totally follow the vision of Gartner that web interfaces with a low technology impact on the client will be the way of the future.
Personal Cloud
Not sure about this one… People are still very reluctant to bearing costs. Yet the cloud needs to get financed. So where the need is there, I don’t think the wallet will follow.
Enterprise App Stores
Before we get here… I would hope that companies get thinking about a service catalog. That way they would not blindly follow technology, and get things aligned between IT and business.
The Internet of Things
Everything connected! Every device is getting some kind of connectivity towards the network. So I totally follow this vision from Gartner.
Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
Next year (2013) will be a very harsh year for a lot of companies within the Benelux. Many vendors are repeating (and repeating) the “Cloud”-mantra to a lot of customers/prospects. Time and time again they say that “THE cloud” will reduce the costs of the IT organization. Yet the reality is far from it! Cloud service have a lot of benefits, yet reducing costs is mostly not one of them. Adding functionality is more the thing, yet reducing costs can only be done by reducing services/functionality. In my honest opinion, the only way organizations can reduce costs it to identify (and catalog!) their services. This list can become an argumentation internally in order to justify the IT costs and become a possible starting point to discussed (un)needed services.
Strategic Big Data
I think this is valid for the “Fortune 500”, yet the Benelux market is far too small for this. Some niche players may have a specific need for this (telecom, banking, … marketing agencies), yet most industry / service companies can surely do without.
Actionable Analytics
Analytics is the way to go if you want to optimize your business! Whether it’s an internal department looking to optimize its costs, or the general business looking to go “lean & mean”… How can one optimize, if one does not know how things are running? You cannot compare things without having a monitoring system.
In Memory Computing
This sounds too much like the “noSQL”-movement from last year. Whilst it sounds very nice, most Belgian companies are way too traditional for such technologies. This is mostly due to the fact that no transactional state can be guaranteed…
Integrated Ecosystems
Many companies are noticing that the cloud solutions they have engaged in are islands on their own. Identity management and federation services will move towards this need… Such systems will be able to integrate several islands into one logical system for the user. This as the 5+ passwords to remember are getting a bit too much.
Karim Vaes 