Nex Gen Mobile
It’s obvious to the casual observer these days that smart mobile devices based on iOS, Android, and even Blackberry OS/QNX are seeing widespread use. But comparing projected worldwide sales of tablets and PCs tells an even more dramatic story. Using the latest sales projections from Gartner on tablets and current PC shipment estimates from IDC, we can see that by 2015 the tablet market will be 479 million units and the PC market will be only just ahead at 535 million units. This means tablets alone are going to have effective parity with PCs in just 3 years. Other data I’ve seen tells a similar story.
So, while it’s still early days yet, it’s also quite clear that enterprises must start treating tablets as equal citizens in their IT strategies. So why won’t they? For several reasons:
Challenges to smart device adoption
• Smart devices have a poor enterprise ecosystem today. Enterprise software vendors and IT departments have organized around older platforms such as Windows and LAMP. Their infrastructure, skills, and relationships are largely built around an older generation of IT. In the meantime, iOS and Android have a lot to learn and to build up to begin to match this world, though they are starting to make progress in this regard.
• Many of the inherent advantages of smart mobile are anathema to structured IT. From app stores to HTML 5, the large and easy to access application universes of next-gen mobile immediately triggers a security lockdown response (right reaction, wrong response) from IT. I’ve even seen IT departments desire to remove app stores from smart mobile devices entirely. The solution is probably policy-based screening of apps, but that’s a solution a ways away.
Key adoption insight
A likely approach that will scale is to do as JP Rangaswami advocates, and “design for loss of control.” This doesn’t mean letting go of essential control such as robust security enforcement, but it does mean providing a framework for users to bring their own mobile devices to work in a safe manner, including use of apps with business data under certain prescribed conditions. This unleashes choice and innovation and vitally, splits the work of adoption and rollout with users that want to use their favorite mobile devices/app to solve a business problem. You better take iOS training and Android training and train yourself for the iOS Development and Android Development to catch up with the tide.
Cloud Computing:
Of all the technology trends on this list, cloud computing is one of the more interesting and in my opinion, now least controversial. While there are far more reasons to adopt cloud technologies than just cost reduction, according to Mike Vizard perceptions of performance issues and lack of visibility into the stack remain one of the top issues for large enterprises. Yet, among the large enterprise CTO and CIOs I speak with, cloud computing is being adopted steadily for non-mission critical applications and some are now even beginning to downsize their data centers. Business agility, vendor choice, and access to next-generation architectures are all benefits of employing the latest cloud computing architectures, which are often radically advanced compared to their traditional enterprise brethren.
Challenges to cloud computing adoption
• Concerns of control. When jobs depend on IT being up and working, then you can be sure there will be reluctance to adopt the cloud. There’s also little question that not going the cloud route will mean short-term job security, but at what ultimate cost? Never mind that many CIOs and heads of IT just feel they can’t yet trust the cloud, despite many cloud providers being more reliable than internal infrastructure (Google recently reported four nines across its Gmail and Google Apps services.)
• Reliability and performance perceptions. Widespread outages by Amazon and Microsoft in the past has set back cloud adoption a minor amount, yet uptime is still extraordinary good by most enterprise standards. More of an issue is moving the enormous datasets that enterprises now posses into and out of the cloud quickly enough. Backhaul and other methods will need to improve substantially to address this satisfactorily for large enterprises.
Key adoption insight
Until cloud computing workloads can be seamlessly transferred back and forth between a company’s private cloud and public/hybrid cloud, adoption will be held back and favored largely for greenfield development. Technologies are now emerging to make this possible, however, and for now, companies should invest in cloud standards (to the extent they exist today) to build private clouds in order to be in position to start selectively transferring services out on a trial basis (and being able to bring them back in safely as needed.)
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