What’s in Store for IT in 2013: Manoj Chugh

BANGALORE, INDIA: The year 2012 carrying forward the trend of some recent years was privy to the proliferation of devices such as smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, etc. thereby creating nodes for the creation and consumption of digital files, leading to a digital information explosion in the country.

As per IDC, smartphone shipments to retailers worldwide is expected to total 717 million in 2012, 45 per cent more than shipped in 2011. The ongoing internet revolution also contributed to the explosion of digital information. India is among the top three fastest growing Internet markets in the world as per industry and research bodies. The country has been the fastest growing market adding over 18 million Internet users and growing at an annual rate of 41 per cent among the BRIC nations.

In fact, India's share of digital information is expected to grow 60-fold by 2020, which would be twice as fast as the worldwide rate driven by the roll-out of 3G/BWA networks, digitization of television networks, and increased technology adoption among individuals, SMBs, enterprises and Government services like the Unique ID project, Census, among others.

With 2012 coming to a close, we have yet again witnessed an eventful year for IT. Industry transition and increasing dependencies on some defining trends like social networking, mobile computing, cloud services, and big data technologies have just shown their surface and would very well be the game changers in 2013. Here are some trends to watch out for in 2013:

1.A shift in IT from Optimizing Costs to Value Generation

There has been a shift in customer conversations from increasing efficiency and optimizing costs to generate more value for the business, but we have to make sure these two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. I would guess that this point is increasingly gaining traction with business discussions around it but since a majority of IT functions were not designed to be value-generating in nature, it will still take some time to realize the merit of IT in broad business plans. The whole conversation around IT transformation is extremely relevant during 2013.

2. Digital Business Models Are the Essence

In the CIO world, there is an interesting concept in its very early stages - SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud). This has all those ingredients which make a CIO/IT heads exited however till now have been discussed in individual capacity. Their relevancy in isolation pales beside their power when combined together. The year 2013 might see a common platform where all of these individual topics come together around a set of leadership initiatives to transform the business.

3. Time for 100 per cent mobile workforce in enterprises

This is one of those disruptive trends which have changed the way a business functions and that too with vicious pace. The present-day workforce has become comfortable with smart devices and pervasive mobility and now quite frankly, its almost unimaginable to not always be connected to hundreds of powerful applications and platforms. Most of us users are now quite comfortable with all of this, and we are strongly motivated to set-up our own IT environments completely outside the view of enterprise IT.

Historically, this reminds me of the mid-1980s where desktop computers (and LANs and productivity suites) were starting to show up everywhere in the workplace. IT could only stand by and watch powerlessly as boatloads of 'office equipment' was purchased and deployed. This evolution of the mobile workforce has given birth to yet another trend BYOD which will grow further in 2013.

4. A new wave of analytics addicts in the business: The business community is slowly coming to terms with the power of predictive analytics. They now realize the cut-throat competition and are willing to go the extra mile to get the advantage of analyzing and acting on the wealth of data. New platform capabilities (e.g. analytics as a service) will be inevitably complemented by management education on how to put these new tools to work to continually improve the business.

Even though we still need BI professionals, but executive analytical proficiency will quickly become part of the modern selection expected of business leaders around the globe. I see more and more IT companies facing this challenge in 2013.

5. Big Data Analytics to Change IT Thinking: Big data analytics is a powerful tool that can be applied to any business. During 2013, we will see the big data analytics discussion take root with IT professionals around the globe, not as something that they have to deliver to the business, but as toolset that they can use to better run their own businesses.

It will inevitably start with the security community as they have clearly started to move in that direction, I do not see other disciplines lagging too far behind. I hope the other verticals would start appreciating the power of a good predictive model.

6. More and More Data in 2013: It will not be wrong to say that there will be more data to capture and store, more data to protect, more data to derive value from we are still lagging behind as we do not have enough resources to the job that needs to be done. Off lately, I have seen the mindset of businesses to have shifted over and I'm sure it will continue to shift. With the decline in the prices of storage products, I think businesses are gearing up to make provisions for the large amount of data which would be coming in 2013.

The is reinforced by the recent EMC and IDC's 6th annual measurement and analysis of the "digital universe". This year's findings reveal the existence of a phenomenon we're calling The Big Data Gap: though the rapidly expanding digital universe (40 ZB by 2020) is teeming with data that holds potential analytic value, only 0.4% of the digital universe is actually being analyzed

The author is regional president of Global Accounts, APJ at EMC.