December 29, 2014 at 10:0810 key strategic technologies of 2015 according to Gartner
Gartner analytic company annually publishes the list of “Top 10 Strategic Technologies of the Next Year”. A year ago, I published a post about Gartner's forecast for 2014 . This time I will tell you what the Gartner list for 2015 looks like and analyze how it differs from last year:
It looks like the “reincarnation” of BigData (which were considered the trend of 2013, but then disappeared from the “top 10”). Information analytics will play an increasingly important role, as more and more data is created in the world: due to the increasing spread of mobile technologies, embedded systems, the “Internet of things”, “smart machines”, etc., and, in turn, for due to the increasing need for companies to study the behavior and habits of customers using all these technologies for commercial purposes. Each application in the future will be accompanied by its internal or external analytical service. Companies will need to learn how to properly filter the huge volumes of both structured and unstructured data coming from various sources, and build reports relevant to a particular person and a specific point in time for all data sources.
The deep comprehensive analytics described above will lead to the emergence of systems that can “communicate” with their environment by sending and receiving informational messages from other nearby “smart devices”. The pioneer in the field of context-sensitive devices will be the information security industry. For example, the server will issue confidential data to the mobile client only if it is in a certain geographical area, inside a secure perimeter (for example, inside the company’s office), and in other cases, the server will deny access to such a mobile client.
As there will be more and more “smart devices” (in the broad sense), and each such device “wants” to have access to the network (often directly to the Internet), protecting the security perimeter is becoming an increasingly less effective strategy. This means that security features must move inside the mobile applications and devices themselves. The architectural design of new applications should initially include information security components, and these components should be tested at the application development stage. This is especially true for such new areas as the Internet of Things and smart machines, where the issue of security is primarily related to privacy issues.
In light of the increasing spread of mobile technology, Gartner predicts a shift in focus from developing separate applications for individual devices to developing integrated mobile services that meet the needs of a mobile user in various business scenarios and diverse technological environments.
Smartphones, wearable electronics, presentation screens, smart TVs, etc. become the basis of a new technological environment, all of whose components must be able to interact with each other. In addition to purely integration problems, an important task is to ensure centralized management of all mobile devices, since now companies have little control over issues such as, for example, the information security of an employee’s personal tablet from which he gains access to the corporate network. A separate important trend will be the development of the concept of the user interface of mobile business applications: the problem is that the interface of business applications should ideally not change much on mobile devices with different graphic screen parameters and, at the same time, be equally “familiar” and convenient to use.
Gartner formulates four main business models for the use of “devices connected to the Internet”: managing various objects, payments, various functional operations and expanding the functionality of existing devices that are not connected to the Internet. As an example, the following scenarios for the use of these models can be given: a production company can use geolocation sensors connected to the Internet, combining them with production equipment to more accurately take into account the internal costs of the enterprise, the insurance company can use similar sensors installed in the car to provide a tariff “Pay in proportion to driving quality”, parking can provide information on the Internet about the availability of seats - so that they can be found in Google Maps or Geosearch similar services.
Gartner predicts a 98% increase in global 3D printer sales in 2015, followed by a doubling in 2016. 3D printing will be widely distributed over the next three years. The most popular applications for this technology are industry, biomedicine, and consumer products. The economic effect of the use of 3D printing in these areas will be achieved by reducing the cost of design, prototyping and production of prototypes.
“Smart machines” are intelligent personal assistants, autonomous robots, intelligent global industrial systems and other self-learning devices, systems or applications.
The main technological problem of this class of devices is the need for deep contextual analytics, which will allow machines to recognize and understand the environment in which they are located, self-learn and function completely autonomously. The upcoming era of "smart machines", according to Gartner, will be the largest event in the evolution of IT technology in history.
The convergence of clouds and mobile technologies will continue, which will lead to the further distribution of applications installed on "any device" and centrally managed from the cloud. The client-cloud architecture differs from the client-server architecture in at least two essential properties: (1) the client and the cloud are separated by a WAN network section (there may be a large network delay, paid traffic, limited channel width) and (2) as the client platform uses a mobile device (that is, the client has limited resources for the processor, memory and disk, and developers are required to use energy-efficient algorithms).
The immediate task of developers in this trend will be the task of synchronizing the working context of applications between different devices and portability of applications between different hardware mobile platforms. Subsequently, technologies evolve so that the application can be launched in parallel on various user devices. For example, now you can simultaneously launch the Google Chrome application simultaneously on the XBox and on the smartphone synchronously so that the smartphone provides the user with a keyboard, and the XBox provides a TV screen. In the future, more and more such applications will be created.
To date, the technology of programmable ("software-defined") networks, data warehouses, data centers, and programmable information security is reaching its maturity. Many cloud services can also be effectively configured through software calls from the client. Thanks to the trend of "fully programmable infrastructure", the enterprise information system ceases to be static - it is becoming more dynamic and able to change its characteristics in accordance with the needs of the business. Gartner predicts continued growth of applications designed for programmable infrastructure.
Web-scale IT is a global computing computing infrastructure design concept that provides large enterprises with the capabilities of a large cloud provider within a corporate network. The concept includes 6 elements: data centers, web-based architecture for providing services, programmable management, flexible business processes focused on collaboration of technology, and corporate culture of a “learning organization”. Examples of such businesses are Amazon, Google, and Facebook. However, the dissemination of the concept of “Web-scale IT” will not be “spasmodic,” because it depends on the stage of penetration of other assistive technologies into the market, such as, for example, the “programmable data center infrastructure” described above, and some others that have not yet received mass production distribution.
Three technologies left the list, most likely due to their too narrow focus: “mobile applications”, “hybrid clouds” and “personal clouds”.
[1] Gartner Press Release
[2] [2] Last year’s post “10 key strategic technologies of 2014 according to Gartner”
New trends of 2015
1. Deep comprehensive and user-invisible analytics
It looks like the “reincarnation” of BigData (which were considered the trend of 2013, but then disappeared from the “top 10”). Information analytics will play an increasingly important role, as more and more data is created in the world: due to the increasing spread of mobile technologies, embedded systems, the “Internet of things”, “smart machines”, etc., and, in turn, for due to the increasing need for companies to study the behavior and habits of customers using all these technologies for commercial purposes. Each application in the future will be accompanied by its internal or external analytical service. Companies will need to learn how to properly filter the huge volumes of both structured and unstructured data coming from various sources, and build reports relevant to a particular person and a specific point in time for all data sources.
2. Context-sensitive systems
The deep comprehensive analytics described above will lead to the emergence of systems that can “communicate” with their environment by sending and receiving informational messages from other nearby “smart devices”. The pioneer in the field of context-sensitive devices will be the information security industry. For example, the server will issue confidential data to the mobile client only if it is in a certain geographical area, inside a secure perimeter (for example, inside the company’s office), and in other cases, the server will deny access to such a mobile client.
3. Information security applications
As there will be more and more “smart devices” (in the broad sense), and each such device “wants” to have access to the network (often directly to the Internet), protecting the security perimeter is becoming an increasingly less effective strategy. This means that security features must move inside the mobile applications and devices themselves. The architectural design of new applications should initially include information security components, and these components should be tested at the application development stage. This is especially true for such new areas as the Internet of Things and smart machines, where the issue of security is primarily related to privacy issues.
Trends from last year
4. Mobile device management
In light of the increasing spread of mobile technology, Gartner predicts a shift in focus from developing separate applications for individual devices to developing integrated mobile services that meet the needs of a mobile user in various business scenarios and diverse technological environments.
Smartphones, wearable electronics, presentation screens, smart TVs, etc. become the basis of a new technological environment, all of whose components must be able to interact with each other. In addition to purely integration problems, an important task is to ensure centralized management of all mobile devices, since now companies have little control over issues such as, for example, the information security of an employee’s personal tablet from which he gains access to the corporate network. A separate important trend will be the development of the concept of the user interface of mobile business applications: the problem is that the interface of business applications should ideally not change much on mobile devices with different graphic screen parameters and, at the same time, be equally “familiar” and convenient to use.
5. "Internet of things"
Gartner formulates four main business models for the use of “devices connected to the Internet”: managing various objects, payments, various functional operations and expanding the functionality of existing devices that are not connected to the Internet. As an example, the following scenarios for the use of these models can be given: a production company can use geolocation sensors connected to the Internet, combining them with production equipment to more accurately take into account the internal costs of the enterprise, the insurance company can use similar sensors installed in the car to provide a tariff “Pay in proportion to driving quality”, parking can provide information on the Internet about the availability of seats - so that they can be found in Google Maps or Geosearch similar services.
6. 3D printing
Gartner predicts a 98% increase in global 3D printer sales in 2015, followed by a doubling in 2016. 3D printing will be widely distributed over the next three years. The most popular applications for this technology are industry, biomedicine, and consumer products. The economic effect of the use of 3D printing in these areas will be achieved by reducing the cost of design, prototyping and production of prototypes.
7. "Smart cars"
“Smart machines” are intelligent personal assistants, autonomous robots, intelligent global industrial systems and other self-learning devices, systems or applications.
The main technological problem of this class of devices is the need for deep contextual analytics, which will allow machines to recognize and understand the environment in which they are located, self-learn and function completely autonomously. The upcoming era of "smart machines", according to Gartner, will be the largest event in the evolution of IT technology in history.
8. Client-Cloud Architecture
The convergence of clouds and mobile technologies will continue, which will lead to the further distribution of applications installed on "any device" and centrally managed from the cloud. The client-cloud architecture differs from the client-server architecture in at least two essential properties: (1) the client and the cloud are separated by a WAN network section (there may be a large network delay, paid traffic, limited channel width) and (2) as the client platform uses a mobile device (that is, the client has limited resources for the processor, memory and disk, and developers are required to use energy-efficient algorithms).
The immediate task of developers in this trend will be the task of synchronizing the working context of applications between different devices and portability of applications between different hardware mobile platforms. Subsequently, technologies evolve so that the application can be launched in parallel on various user devices. For example, now you can simultaneously launch the Google Chrome application simultaneously on the XBox and on the smartphone synchronously so that the smartphone provides the user with a keyboard, and the XBox provides a TV screen. In the future, more and more such applications will be created.
9. All data center resources will become programmable
To date, the technology of programmable ("software-defined") networks, data warehouses, data centers, and programmable information security is reaching its maturity. Many cloud services can also be effectively configured through software calls from the client. Thanks to the trend of "fully programmable infrastructure", the enterprise information system ceases to be static - it is becoming more dynamic and able to change its characteristics in accordance with the needs of the business. Gartner predicts continued growth of applications designed for programmable infrastructure.
10. Web-Scale IT
Web-scale IT is a global computing computing infrastructure design concept that provides large enterprises with the capabilities of a large cloud provider within a corporate network. The concept includes 6 elements: data centers, web-based architecture for providing services, programmable management, flexible business processes focused on collaboration of technology, and corporate culture of a “learning organization”. Examples of such businesses are Amazon, Google, and Facebook. However, the dissemination of the concept of “Web-scale IT” will not be “spasmodic,” because it depends on the stage of penetration of other assistive technologies into the market, such as, for example, the “programmable data center infrastructure” described above, and some others that have not yet received mass production distribution.
Last year's technologies that left the "top"
Three technologies left the list, most likely due to their too narrow focus: “mobile applications”, “hybrid clouds” and “personal clouds”.
Additional materials:
[1] Gartner Press Release
[2] [2] Last year’s post “10 key strategic technologies of 2014 according to Gartner”