Top 20 Technology Driven Trends for 2012

By Daniel Burrus

No matter what industry you’re in, your company can’t survive without technology. And these days, even non-technical employees know that technology goes way beyond desktop computers and networks. From smart phones and tablet computers to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there’s a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep track of, but also to profit from.Therefore, as a CIO, it’s up to you to anticipate the future technology trends that are shaping your business and then develop innovative ways to implement them in your organization.
Now that 2012 is well underway, be ready for the following 20 technology-driven trends to continue to create both disruption and opportunity in the business world. But rather than just react to them, be "pre-active" to future known events and plan how you’ll profit from them now. That’s the only way you’ll gain competitive advantage and become viewed as both a strategy creator and enabler within your company.
So here are the Top 20 tech trends I think you should be aware of this year:
1) Rapid growth of Big Data, a term used to describe the technologies and techniques used to capture and utilize the exponentially increasing streams of data with the goal of bringing enterprise-wide visibility and insights to make rapid critical decisions, will usher in high speed analytics (HSA). Using advanced cloud services, HSA will increasingly be used as a complement to existing information management systems and programs to tame the massive data explosion. This new level of data integration and analytics will require many new skills and cross-functional buy-in in order to break down the many data and organizational silos that still exist. The rapid increase in data makes this a fast growing hard trend that cannot be ignored.
2) Cloud computing and advanced cloud services will be increasingly embraced by business of all sizes, as this represents a major shift in how organizations obtain and maintain software, hardware, and computing capacity. As consumers, we first experienced public clouds (think about when you first used Google or Apple’s MobileMe and now iCloud). Then we saw more private clouds and hybrid clouds from businesses such as Flextronics, Siemens, Accenture, and many others, all using the cloud to cut costs in human resources and sales management functions. This was only the beginning, as cloud services enable the rapid transformation all business processes.
3) On Demand Services will increasingly be offered to companies needing to rapidly deploy new services. Hardware as a service (HaaS) joins Software as a Service (SaaS), creating what some have called “IT as a service” (ITaaS). All will grow rapidly with many new players in a multitude of business process categories. These services will help companies cut costs as they provide access to powerful software programs and the latest technology without having the expense of a large IT staff and time-consuming, expensive upgrades. As a result, IT will be increasingly freed to focus on enabling business process transformation, which will allow organizations to maximize their return on technology investments.  
4) Virtualization of storage, desktops, applications, and networking will see continued acceptance and growth by both large and small businesses as virtualization security improves. We will continue to see the virtualization of processing power, allowing mobile devices to access supercomputer capabilities and apply it to processes such as purchasing and logistics, to name a few.
5) Consumerization of IT increases as the source for innovation and technology continues to be driven by the consumer thanks to rapid advances in processing power, storage, and bandwidth. Smart companies have recognized that this is a hard tend that will continue and have stopped fighting consumerization. Instead, they are turning this trend into a competitive advantage by consumerizing their applications, such as recommending safe and secure third party hardware and apps. Encouraging employees to share productivity enhancing consumer technology will become a wise strategy.
6) Gameification of training and education will fuel a fast moving hard trend using advanced simulations and skill-based learning systems that are self-diagnostic, interactive, game-like, and competitive -- all focused on giving the user an immersive experience thanks to a photo-realistic 3D interface. Some will develop software using these gaming techniques to work on existing hardware systems such as the Xbox and PlayStation. A social component of gameification that includes sharing will drive success.
7) Social business takes on a new level of urgency as organizations shift from an Information Age “informing” model to a Communication Age “communicating and engaging” model. Social software for business will reach a new level of adoption with applications to enhance relationships, collaboration, networking, social validation, and more. Social search will increasingly be used by marketers and researchers, not to mention Wall Street, to tap into millions of daily tweets and Facebook conversations, providing real-time analysis of many key consumer metrics.
8) Smartphones and tablets will become our primary personal computers, and the mobile Web will become a must-have capability. This means an enterprise mobility strategy will become mandatory for all size organizations as we see mobile data, mobile media, mobile sales, mobile marketing, mobile commerce, mobile finance, mobile payments, mobile health, and many more explode. The vast majority of mobile phones sold globally will have a browser, making the smart phone our primary computer that is with us 24/7 and signaling a profound shift in global computing. This new level of mobility will allow any size business to transform how they market, sell, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, and innovate using mobility.
9) Tablet computers with enterprise level Web apps will be used to transform sales and service support and then move to purchasing, logistics, just-in-time training, and much more.
10) Intelligent electronic agents using natural language voice commands take off with Apple’s Siri, rapidly followed by Android, Microsoft, and others all offering what will become a mobile electronic concierge on your smart devices including your phone, tablet, and television. Soon retailers will have a Siri-like sales assistant, and maintenance workers will have a Siri-like assistant. The possibilities are endless. 
11) Digital identity management will become increasingly important to both organizations and individuals as new software allows users to better manage their multiple identities across business and personal networks. Next generation biometrics will play a key role in both identity management and security.
12) Visual communications takes video conferencing to a new level with programs like SKYPE, Apple's FaceTime, and others giving us video communication on phones, tablets, and home televisions. Visual communications will be integrated with current video conferencing systems, fueling this as a main relationship-building tool for businesses of all sizes.
13) Enhanced location awareness will accelerate the number of business-to-consumer apps for smart phones and tablets that will take geo-social marketing and sales to a new level of creative application, driving rapid growth.
14) Geo-spatial visualization combines geographic information systems (GIS) with location-aware data, radio frequency identification (RFID), and other location-aware sensors (including the current location of users from the use of their mobile devices) to create new insights and competitive advantage. Early applications include logistics and supply chain to name a few.
15) Smart TV using apps will get a major boost in the marketplace, fueling a major shift in home viewing. Ever wonder how you could have over 500 cable or satellite channels and nothing to watch? You didn’t have apps on your TV allowing you to personalize the experience. This is the beginning of a major shift that will take place in living rooms globally. Look for Apple to introduce the iTV, basically a living room sized iPad.
16) Multiple app stores for all smart phone, tablet, and television operating systems (Android, Blackberry, Windows, and others) will take off, creating an abundant distribution and sales ecosystem for all. This will cement the revolution versus evolution that apps software represents. We will see business app stores for the enterprise starting this year.
17) 3D displays for smartphones and tablets will be the breakthrough that will drive wide-scale consumer acceptance of 3D computing. 3D computing for the enterprise will grow rapidly for military, medicine, fashion, architecture, and entertainment applications.
18) eBooks, eNewspapers, and eMagazines pass the tipping point due to the abundance of smartphones with readable displays, tablets that provide a full color experience, and publishers providing apps that give a better than paper experience by including cut, copy, paste, print, and multimedia capabilities. In addition, eBook readers will have high quality with a low enough price to bring in the masses. 
9) Interactive multimedia eTextbooks will finally take off thanks to Apple’s iBook Author and other competing tools, freeing new publishers to create compelling and engaging content, and freeing students from a static, expensive, and literally heavy experience. 
20) Wireless machine-to-machine applications such as two-way meter reading, surveillance, vending machine, and point-of-sale solutions take off thanks to faster wireless data networks.
Are these the only technology-driven trends for 2012 to be aware of? Of course not. As any CIO knows, technology is always evolving, resulting in new trends emerging and new products appearing every day. That’s why one of your key functions is to stay ahead of the trends by anticipating them, adapting them to your unique environment before the competition does, and ultimately enabling your organization to profit from them. The more you’re able to do that, the sooner you’ll be able to take your organization to the next level of success.
Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients better understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous, untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books, including the national bestseller "Flash Foresight: How To See the Invisible and Do the Impossible" as well as the highly acclaimed Technotrends. Be sure to check out Volume 2 of Daniel's "Know What's Next Magazine," an annual publication on strategies for transforming your business and future.

Source:http://www.cioupdate.com/technology-trends/the-top-20-technology-driven-trends-for-2012.html

A Single Bit of Information Stored on An 12 Atoms: The Future Will Be Tomorrow

Dan Quayle, anti-ferromagnetic bits and the future of storage: Embracing the 6 "S" modelFebruary 8, 2012 - 6:00 A.M.

In a previous post, I invoked Thomas Jefferson in predicting the future of storage.

As I prepare to conclude and summarize this series of Computerworld posts, I'd like to invoke another, eminently-quotable American statesman, Dan Quayle. Our 44th vice president famously described the future by stating:

"The future will be better tomorrow."

This seems especially appropriate given the storage news earlier this month. Researchers from IBM announced that they had successfully stored a single bit of information in an array of 12 atoms. As it currently takes approximately one million atoms to store a bit of information using conventional technology, this announcement points to an exciting potential approach to achieving far denser storage (and, presumably, far less expensive and far greener storage) in the future.

Of course, the new approach (leveraging anti-ferromagnetic materials) presents a number of technical and manufacturing challenges. As one of the IBM researchers said, "Even though I as a scientist would totally dig having a scanning tunneling microscope in every household, I agree it's a very experimental tool."

While the future of storage may be more exciting tomorrow, I don't believe we need to look too far out or invoke exotic new technologies to achieve radical improvements in storage. Instead, we can apply well proven techniques in what I call the 6 "S" model of storage.

As I have argued throughout this blog, much of the mainstream storage industry continues to promote an approach that was appropriate for the IT workloads that were predominant when Quayle was vice-president.

Back then, the design center for IT was the delivery of high reliability, high performance transactional systems. In such environments, the amount of data to be stored was relatively small (a 500 GB database is HUGE), and there was a premium on performance and reliability. Not surprisingly, the IT environment tended to consist of monolithic applications, running on proprietary databases and operating systems on highly-engineered SPARC servers. Unsurprisingly, storage systems were also proprietary, highly engineered and monolithic.

Over the last two decades, computing has changed dramatically. Applications are developed in frameworks and delivered across virtualized servers running Linux on top of large numbers of commodity x86 boxes. But, storage has remained largely proprietary and monolithic.

The trends that have dominated computing must inevitably catch up with storage. There are several reasons for this, including:
The massive growth in unstructured data (over 40% CAGR).
The inexorable move towards virtualization (over 50% of all IT workloads by the end of 2012).
"Big Data"/Map-Reduce workloads where compute, data, and analysis are distributed across large numbers of devices.
Public, private and hybrid clouds, which require that storage and computing be delivered as multi-tenant, multi-purpose clouds.

All of these trends will pose insurmountable challenges to the proprietary, monolithic model of storage. Instead, the new model of storage will start to conform to the 6 S model:

1. Software: Value in storage will move to software and away from highly-engineered hardware.

2. Scale out: Higher levels of performance, capacity, and availability will be delivered by aggregating more commodity servers and disks (the little box approach) rather than deploying larger monolithic systems.

3. Simplicity: Complicated, storage-specific technologies will yield to standard Ethernet, Linux, etc.

4. Sourced openly: Storage will be delivered as open source software on commodity boxes.

5. Superior economics: The combination of all of the above will cause the trend lines for storage pricing to come back in line with Moore's law.

And the sixth "S"? Super Sexy. Embrace all of the above, and the next couple of years will be very exciting years in storage.

Of course, I may be wrong. But, as Dan Quayle also said, "I stand by all my misstatements."

Ben Golub was CEO of Gluster, Inc., which is now the Storage Business Unit of Red Hat. He is on Twitter @golubbe. Source:http://blogs.computerworld.com/19672/dan_quayle_anti_ferromagnetic_bits_and_the_future_of_storage_embracing_the_6_s_model