Technology expenditure cuts brought about by declining oil prices, coupled with a few tech trends highlighted in the recently conclude Consumer Electronics Shows could bring about a rise in overall cloud adoption.
For example in Canada, many companies, particularly those located in the energy patch, are expected to dial down on new project spending. However, at least one IT industry analyst believes this could bring about a renewed focus on cloud computing.
“CIOs need to prepare for a 10 per cent to 25 per cent budget cut,” said Nigel Wallis research director for vertical markets and new initiatives at IDC Canada. “They’ll see greater standardization in equipment and operations.”
IT departments will be gearing for consolidation of data centres and database.
Global sourcing, such as offloading business processing to overseas operation will grow as will the adoption of cloud technology and software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service, said Wallis.
IDC latest report titled: The Impact of Declining Oil Prices on the Canadian ICT Market predicts Canadian firms and government will cut over $415 million from their ICT spend in 2015, predominantly in Alberta.
Wallis said among the top IT losers will be:
- IT consulting, systems integration and custom application development. These areas will see a 20 per cent reduction in overall spend
- Support services
- Software licences. About a 18 per cent reduction
- Hardware (PCs and desktops). Estimated 18 per cent reduction
- Server spend. About a 12 per cent reduction
On the other hand, trends pushing data generating devices and technologies will push the adoption of cloud-based storage in the business and consumer areas, said Brian Taptich, CEO of cloud platform firm Bitcasa
For example, he said, drones and machines connecting to the Internet are created, these Internet of Things machines will generate massive amounts of data. Taptich said data will increasingly be transferred to cloud storage as devices become unable to handle the growing volume of information.
Another potential contributor to the data deluge are 4K televisions. Movies for these ultra-high definition TVs typically account for 110GB of data or more compared to the mere eight to 15GB of HD movies for the current 1920×1080 HD TVs.
New media transcoding and streaming technologies will emerge to make transmission of streaming videos to cloud storage platforms, he said In a recent post on Techradar.com,
The darling of the most recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 4 televisions are fast making the way living rooms across the world.
The new Ultra high definition sets boasts of having four times the resolution of 1920×1080 HD TVs. High digital content means bigger video files. Current 1080 HD movies account for eight to 15 GB. Movies for 4K sets will easily eat up 110 GB.
Taptich predicts downloading video files will become a thing of the past. He foresees future streaming technology and media transcoding that will enable seamless transmission to cloud storage platforms.