By Sneha Jha, CIO India
The year 2011 will herald the new era of' Mobilution'. Unveiling the IDC predictions report for the year, Philippe de Marcillac, Executive Vice President, IDC, International Business Units underscored the fact that mobility is slated to witness an explosive growth. The research agency is bullish that mobilution will revolutionize the business landscape.
IDC expects that the surge in mobility will be fueled by the spurt in device volumes, new form factors like tablets and smartphones and millions of mobile apps. The world will witness a sharp growth from 1.3 to 1.4 billion devices to 2 billion devices by 2014, IDC predicts.
But as this situation unfolds, it will present new challenges for the enterprise. There will be a big implication in terms of connections. CIOs will have to provide a high level of connectivity to help their organization reap the benefits of mobility.
Drawing up a list of tech predictions, IDC forecast that business analytics will also be on the radar of most IT execs in 2011. Business analytics (BA) will be embedded in the business operations and processes of enterprises "Organizations can leverage BA if they want to maximize their capacity by targeting more and more groups of segmented customers. In deploying business analytics they are driven by the goals to enable better decisions, improved revenue growth, effective risk management and they also aim at cutting costs in mature markets," emphasized Philippe de Marcillac, EVP, IDC.
While formulating a BI strategy the CIOs maintain a laser sharp focus on best practices for addressing growing demand for end-user flexibility, creating a BI/analytics organizational structure, methods for evaluating BI competency/maturity/ pervasiveness, tools that support international financial reporting standards, supporting social media and BI and self-service BI.
IDC is buoyant that there will be a continued growth in opportunity in 2011 and beyond. This is particularly true in case of emerging markets because they are replete with growth opportunities. The IT spending in these markets is driven by infrastructure build out.
The research also highlighted that these markets will be miles ahead of the matured market when it comes to IT services growth. The study revealed that the IT services growth in the emerging markets is three times more than that of mature markets.
The study also suggests that public and private clouds are poised to surge in 2011. Organizations are showing some degree of acceptance towards cloud computing but cloud still remains a long term strategy. It's not a top of the mind priority for IT execs.
The agency predicts that there will be a shift of traditional spends to cloud, particularly with software, servers and storage. Private Cloud will gain traction in the more mature markets where a cloud-like infrastructure is needs to be deployed to support dynamic IT. Elsewhere demand will be confined to select enterprise sectors. The research upholds that collaborative apps, security and storage on demand as well as BI will see the greatest demand - workload being the key deciding factor.
Public cloud services will continue to remain a mature market play for now. It is still early days for public IT cloud spending. The firm highlighted that dedicated hosting centers particularly ISPs are increasingly interested in cloud services and they would mostly focus on basic SaaS apps, Storage-as-a-Service and cloud based email infrastructure. They also predict the emergence of regional mega-data centers and similar type cloud providers. However there will be some major obstacles relating to availability of trusted partners and security which threaten to derail the cloud adoption plans.
The study also established that the new emerging world order is in a state of constant flux. Earlier Europe and US accounted for 71 percent of the global business but in 2001 the word BRIC was coined. And that changed the face of global business. Now the action has shifted to these emerging BRIC economies. However, the emerging markets have different characteristics some are big like China, India and Brazil. Some of them are very cyclical like Russia, Mexico, Poland, Argentina and Turkey.
IDC projects that 2011 will give a new impetus to the start of 'Intelligent Cities'. The idea of intelligent cities is always met with a high degree of skepticism. But it's an idea whose time has come. The results of the research reveal that cities characterized by state of the art infrastructure, advanced economy and smart urban planning will emerge as the trading giants of tomorrow. These intelligently planned cities will leverage the all encompassing reach of technology to overcome the challenges of rapid urbanization.