What technologies and trends are likely to have the greatest impact on your business next year? Analyst firm Gartner Inc. today released a list of what it thinks are the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2014 and much of it appears to be driven by mobile technology, social networking, cloud and data.
The convergence of these four forces, according to David Cearley, vice-president of Gartner, drive change and create opportunities but organizations do not necessarily need to invest now on all the technologies that Gartner lists.
“We have identified the top 10technologies that companies should factor into their strategic planning processes,” he said. “This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the listed technologies, but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years.”
He said the following technologies are “creating demand for advanced programmable infrastructures that can execute at Web-scale.”:
Mobile device diversity pressures IT – The consequences of the bring your own device (BYOD) trend is doubling or even tripling the size of the mobile workforce and it placing a tremendous strain on IT and finance departments. Gartner said that through 2018, the growing variety of mobile devices, computing styles and user contexts will make everything-anywhere strategies “unachievable.”
Organizations need to totally review their BYOD policies and place emphasis on expectation about what employees can and cannot do and balance confidentiality and privacy requirements.
Mobile apps – Improved JavaScript performance will push HTML5 and the browser as mainstream enterprise application development environments by 2014. Developers should focus on creating expanded user interaction models such as richer voice and video as well as applications that span a variety of devices. For the next few years there will be no single tool for all types of mobile applications.
The next evolution of user experience will involve leveraging intent inferred from emotions and actions.
Internet of Everything – Most vendors and enterprises have yet to explore the possibilities of an expanded Internet and many are not yet operationally and organizationally ready for the blossoming of the Internet of Everything. Combining data streams and services created by digitizing everything will create four basic usage models – manage; monetize; operate; and extends. Enterprises from all industries can leverage these four models.
Software defined anything – Software defined anything relates to the growing market for improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data centre interoperability through automation via cloud computing. SDx, incorporates initiatives such as OpenStack, OpenFlow, Open Rack and the Open Compute Project.
Vendors will always claim openness but different interpretations of SDx may be anything but open. Vendors will always try to maintain their leadership in their chosen SDx domain (software defined networking, software defined storage software defined infrastructure etc.) so they may be reluctant to adopt some forms of standardization.
Find out more about the top 2014 IT trends here