Global enterprise IT spending is projected to total $2.7 trillion in
2012, a 3.9 percent increase from 2011 spending of $2.6 trillion, according to
Gartner.

While enterprise IT spending growth is slowing from the expected 5.9
percent increase in 2011, it’s important to note that despite the global
economic challenges, enterprises will continue to invest in IT.

“The days when IT was the passive observer of the world are over. Global
politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT. IT is a primary driver
of business growth. For example, this year 350 companies will each invest more
than $1 billion in IT. They are doing this because IT impacts their business
performance,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and
global head of Research.

Two-thirds of CEOs believe IT will make a greater contribution to their industry
in the next 10 years than any prior decades.

IT leaders must embrace the post-modern business, a business driven by
customer relationships, fueled by the explosion in information, collaboration,
and mobility.

This new era brings with it urgent and compelling forces. They include:
the cloud, social, mobility, and an explosion in information.

These forces are innovative and disruptive just taken on their own, but
brought together, they are revolutionizing business and society. This nexus
defines the next age of computing. To understand this change, you must
appreciate each of the forces.

The cloud combines the industrialization of IT capabilities and the
disruptive impact of new IT-led business models. However, the shift away from
traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is still in the very
early stages.

Gartner estimates that while $74
billion was spent on public cloud services in 2010, representing 3 percent of
enterprise spending. But, public cloud services will grow five times faster
than overall IT enterprise spending of 19 percent annually through 2015.

The next stage of social computing is about mass-customer, mass-citizen,
and mass-employee involvement with enterprise systems.

With 1.2 billion people on social networks, 20 percent of the world’s
population, social computing is in its next phase. IT leaders must immediately
incorporate social software capabilities throughout their enterprise systems.

The concept of one enterprise data warehouse containing all information
needed for decisions is dead. Multiple systems, including content management,
data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with
data services and metadata, will become the logical” enterprise data
warehouse.

The shift to mobile is almost overtaking many IT organizations who can’t
move fast enough to catch up. Mobile is not a coming trend. It has already
happened. In 2010, the installed base of mobile PCs and smartphones exceeded
that of desktop PCs.

Less than 20 million media tablets, such as the iPad, were sold in 2010,
but by 2016, 900 million media tablets will be purchased one for every eight
people on earth. By 2014, the installed base of devices based on lightweight
mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and
Microsoft’s Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based
systems.

By 2014, private app stores will be deployed by 60 percent of IT
organizations. The applications themselves will be redesigned they will
become context-enabled, understanding the user’s intent automatically. Mobile
computing is not just the desktop on a handheld device. The future of mobile
computing is context-aware computing.

Cloud, social, information and mobile, combined the new nexus. Where
data centers will give way to data clouds, mobile devices become windows into
personal clouds. Personal computing will become massive collaborative
computing, and information technologies will be overshadowed by information
ecologies.

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]