The ‘megatrends’ shaping the IT industry

01 Aug 2012

The pressure is on for IT teams to deliver social, mobile, cloud, big data, but a radical overhaul of IT architectures and mindsets will be required, says Jessica Twentyman

Social, mobile, cloud, big data: how is a hard-pressed corporate IT team supposed to keep up? IT market research firm Gartner calls the convergence of these trends “the nexus of forces”. It’s a rather grandiose term but, given how quickly and fundamentally these forces are transforming user behavior and creating new opportunities for business, perhaps that’s appropriate.

Either way, this new age of user-centric computing can only mean one thing for the IT department, says Gartner: legacy architectures and legacy mindsets must adapt, or face obsolescence.

“Traditional IT relies on engineering and prescription: I build a specific tool and teach you how to use it. Now, because of consumerisation and democratisation of IT, more control has shifted to the user, and the role of IT is to adapt and absorb, not just prescribe,” they write in a recent report, The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information

As IT professionals start working towards a better understanding of their new roles and responsibilities, all the signs suggest that suppliers will be there to greet them on arrival.

Take, for example, Microsoft’s announcements of its Windows 8 operating system, back in April, and its Office 2013 applications suite, earlier this month: the emphasis so far has been very much on the extent to which these new products tick the social/mobile/cloud/information boxes. With the new version of Office, for example, there’s integration with LinkedIn and collaboration platform SharePoint, a new mobile-friendly interface (Metro) and stylus-powered functions, the ability to store documents in Microsoft’s cloud-based SkyDrive service, for example.

But it’s not just the user-facing front-end technologies that are changing: just this week, networking company Juniper Networks and WAN optimization specialist Riverbed Technology announced they were teaming up to provide companies with the technology to “securely deliver better performance of applications across devices, networks and clouds.”

Under the terms of the deal, in which Juniper will spend over $75 million over the next four years to license Riverbed’s Steelhead mobile technology for smartphones and tablets into its own Juno Pulse client, designed to support access and connectivity for both mobile and non-mobile devices. The company will also include Riverbed's application delivery controller technology in some of its hardware.

Great changes are clearly ahead, and while the resources required for a radical IT overhaul may not be readily available at some organisations right now, the planning stages should be well underway, with a close eye kept on market developments as clues to the directions in which the IT team might proceed. Those companies that are not thinking in these terms may soon find themselves at a distinct disadvantage, compared to competitors – if, in fact, they aren’t already.

Or, as the Gartner report warns: “Organisations that ignore the Nexus of Forces will be displaced by those that can move into the opportunity space more quickly – and the pace is accelerating.”

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