Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013

24 Oct 2012

IT market analyst firm announces its annual list of the technologies it believes will have the most significant impact on businesses over the next three years.

It's about this time of year that analysts at IT market research company like to take a punt on the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic to "most organisations" in 2013.

But before we launch into the list, and Gartner's accompanying exposition of each technology trend, it might be useful to start by understanding how the firm defines a technology as "strategic".

According to the company, it's one "with potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years." Factors that denote significant impact, meanwhile, include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business; the need for major [financial] investment; or a risk of being late to adopt.

At the announcement of the 2013 top 10, Gartner analyst David Cearley was keen to emphasise that this is not a shopping list for technology decision-makers. While IT leaders should factor all 10 technologies into their strategic planning processes over the next two years, he said, “this does not necessarily mean enterprises should adopt and invest in all of the listed technologies.” Instead, they should be making deliberate decisions about how these technologies fit with their businesses’ needs in the near future.

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 are:

Mobile device battles: A war is looming between the Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows 8 platforms. The implications for IT is that the era of PC/Windows dominance is over and that admins will be forced to support a variety of form factors and operating systems.

Mobile applications and HTML5: Gartner is predicting a shift away from native apps to web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. But native apps won’t disappear, it says, “and will always offer the best user experience and most sophisticated features.”

Personal cloud: The personal cloud will be “the glue that connects the web of devices [users] choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives”, says Gartner. In other words, this cloud-based location will be portable, always-available place where we keep our content and access our services.

Enterprise app stores: Just as you can download an app to count calories or learn Portuguese from the Apple App Store or from Google Play, Gartner believes that by 2014, many businesses will have their own app stores where employees can download work-related mobile apps.

The Internet of Things: This phrase is used to describe an environment where connected devices - from smartphones and fridges to blood-sugar level monitors and electricity meters - are able to ‘talk’ to each other and communicate information about their current state, using the Internet. “The IoT will enable a wide range of new applications and services, while raising many new challenges,” Gartner predicts.

Hybrid IT and cloud computing: According to Gartner’s analysts, a recent survey they conducted shows that an internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) model is emerging, as IT teams get to grips with their responsibility for improving the provisioning and consumption of “inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex” cloud service for internal users and external business partners.

Strategic big data: Dealing with big data is leading enterprises to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse and moving towards multiple systems, tied together with data services and metadata, which will become the “logical” data warehouse.

Actionable analytics: Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context, says Gartner. With mobile clients linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data preositories, users could theoretically use analysis at the time and place of every business process action, or in other words,  “everywhere and every time”.

In-memory computing: With in-memory computing, the execution of certain types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds. That opens up the possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applciations against the same dataset, with huge implications for business innovation.

Integrated ecosystems: Users want lower cost, simplicity and more assured security from IT systems. Vendors want more control over the solution stack and fatter profit margins. Gartner believes that, as a result of these drivers, we’ll see more appliances combining hardware and software and services; cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages where companies can buy cloud services; and mobile vendors looking to exert various degrees of control over the end-to-end mobile ecosystem, from the client through to the apps.

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