Yesterday I was one of four to attend a webinar in the presentation area from the Gartner Group. Gartner's Managing Vice President, Raymond Paquet, discussed "Technology Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore." Paquet presented the ten technology trends driving major changea in business processes or revenue streams, consumer behavior or spending, or IT industry dynamics. Those ten are:
- Virtualization
- Data Deluge
- Energy &Green IT
- Consumerization & Social Software
- Unified Communications
- Mobile & Wireless
- Complex Resource Tracking
- System Density
- Mash Ups& Enterprise Portals
- Cloud Computing
Paquet sees these as "disruptive trends that are reshaping the information technology and business landscape." Companies must identify the disruptive technologies that will impact their users and their business and develop plans to address these disruptions." And he presented what he considers the top 10 technologies and related trends that will drive significant disruption over the next five years.
FYI, disruptive technologies is a concept brought forward by Clayton M. Christensen in his 1995 article "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave," and his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. I read the book and have a copy in my cubicle if anyone would like to borrow it. Just a week ago I bought a copy of his latest, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns which I hope to start this weekend.
Tom Rees and Rob MacArthur also attended the webinar. Robert directs IT for the College of Ag & Life Sciences and I was not surprised when he said that he was pretty well versed on these trends. What I'd like to know more about is what UITS is doing in relation to these ten trends.
I jotted down some notes on the ten trends that Paquet presented. He went through them quickly so I regret I did not do a better job taking notes.
- Virtualization (critical time now) - a server uses 65% power doing nothing
- Data Deluge (critical time now) - estimated data growth is 650% in the next 5 years; expect 40 exabytes of new data over the next 5 years which is greater than all the data of the past 5,000 years; this means we need to re-think our storage infrastructure; great buzz word data de-duplication; thin provisioning; automated tiering; HSM principles; virtual tape; important: it is demand driven - more access creates more data; issues that affect us involve compliance, back-up, audits, security
- Energy & Green IT (critical time 2009-2010) - this trends forces reveiws of IT efficiency; it intersects between facilities and IT; pushes for a corporate social responsibility; and moves power issues up the food chain
- Consumerization & Social Software (critical time 2009-2010) - I've seen this stat before and it's a good one, particularly on the university campus where when you try to raise awareness of social software you often encounter this response: "I know the students do that but I don't." 62% of new social software users are between 39-51; the impact on new technologies is important because it drives use, demand and adoption; Paquet says "you can't stop users from bringin it in through wireless and smartphones; this then drives our decisions and need to accept it and support it; social software is a factor inside and outside the enterprise; it has an impact on collaboration (examples he gave are wikis and blogs), content sharing (good that we have gone with Google for students and hopefully we'll see this extended to staff and faculty), content aggregation, and social validation.
- Unified Communication (critical time 2011-2013) - there are 6.7B text messages sent every 24 hours around the world; this means we must tightly integrate communication applications such as text/SMS, IM, email, wireless, VOIP, VTC, ATC, mobility, PBX, Presence, and workspaces
- Mobile & Wireless (critical time 2010-2012) - there are thousands of new applications coming online; people use phones to text message and update their social network sites; we need to be able to manage this; however, we are currently lacking adequate tools to manage it and need a plan on how we can do this; it means being able to manage our own environments
- Complex Resource Tracking (critical time 2011-2013) - we need to manage energy consumption, visualize power consumption of resources, automate energy usage to optimal levels, and dynamically move workloads
- System Density (critical time 2011-2012) - within 3 years the cost to operate a server will exceed the cost of that server; blades will become many different things, such as servers, storage switches, memory, I/O, ...; and at this time blades are still highly proprietary; virtualization is critical to success and it is key to engage your facilities team
- Mash Ups & Enterprise Portals (critical time 2010-2011) - maybe there is a new phase for portals but we've been talking about portals for some years; UA is just behind most of higher ed in implementing one; work is currently underway in UITS enterprise computing to implement a campus portal soon; Robert MacArthur talked about mash ups I'd say 3 years ago but it have been too complicated until recently to attempt. I hope this means tools to make the process less labor intensive are now available. I think it is also very important to have standardized the relevant data, on this campus let's say campus maps, to make this work across the enterprise
- Cloud Computing (critical time 2010-2012) - [I remember Larry Rapagnani our CIO back in the early to mid-90s talking about cloud computing] "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using internet tools." we have private clouds improving our collective business agility and we can use cloud computing to focus on results [Dr. Ray Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*.] evaluate cloud delivery models for internal uses [you can see I was getting tired of madly jotting done Paquet's points]; agility enables delivering more service. "cloud computing" he said is the number one term searched on the Gartner Group website.
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