What will be the top 10 technologies for 2012?

As we look forward to the year ahead, the Gartner Group has released their predictions for the “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012”. The following complex ideas evolved from the Gartner Symposium held recently in Orlando.

The definition of a strategic technology is one that may have a significant impact on business in the next three years. Significant impact can be a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for significant investment or the risk of being a late adopter.

The top 10 strategic technology predictions for 2012 include:

Media tablets and beyond

This is mobile technology, the assumption being that it is wirelessly connected and will take multiple forms, from a user’s own smartphone or tablet to custom corporate platforms.

The strategies to be considered here are the business-to-employee scenario and also the business-to-consumer scenario. The strategy must consider impact on behaviour, content, and importantly, security. This will have a bigger impact on the larger players who are delivering applications to the consumer market, but will also create new opportunities for start-ups based on innovative apps.

Mobile-centric applications and interfaces

We can expect to see new interfaces based on touch, gesture, search, video and voice. This will drive the need for new development skills creating simpler small apps. By 2015, mobile web technologies will have advanced sufficiently so that half the applications written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as web apps.

Contextual and social user experience

The contextual application will anticipate our requirements based on information such as our current location, temperature, activity calendar or even current TV show being watched, plus much more.

Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items, such as consumer devices or physical assets, and these objects are connected to the internet.

As more things are connected and measured we will see more live data feeds, so this connection is reaching a critical point to become commercially viable. For example, imagine your car service centre monitoring your car continuously and knowing you have a flat tyre as quickly as you do.

Key elements of the IoT include:

Embedded sensors:

• Embedded sensors that report change of state.
• Image recognition to identify all forms of images from copyright searches to locating vehicles by type.
• Near Field Communication (NFC) payment: allowing users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader.
• There are other applications for passing data on their way in this area too.

Next-generation analysis:

• Access to more data and faster systems, including cloud-based processor banks, is driving faster data analysis of both off-line historical data and on-line live data; leading to faster business decision cycles.
• Likely to have a profound effect on what relatively small organisations can do in niche and competitive areas due to reduced requirement for investment to enter the analytics arena.

Big data:

• With more data available at higher speeds, complexity of data warehousing is going to reach a new level.
• Not sure how much of an impact this will have on SMEs.

In-memory computing:

• Flash memory will become cheaper and more available.
• This will lead to faster processors and development in memory processing which, for us, will mean faster computers.

Extreme low-energy servers:

• Emerging technologies of low energy servers may become popular for low processing requirements, but won’t have much of an impact on the SME marketplace.

Cloud computing:

• For us, this is the big one. Gartner is predicting that over the next few years Oracle, IBM, SAP and most other enterprise-level providers will have cloud-based products in the market, and will be fully engaged.
• This will be a disruptive force that changes the IT landscape for most industries.
• Gartner are predicting an increase in competition with Microsoft’s Office 365 products expanding.

Much of the technology discussed in this report is going to deliver us services and information, rather than devices. Therefore, my interpretation is that we now have an interconnected world with portable connected devices in our hands, laps and desks. From now, the major frontier in IT will be around how large organisations will structure and deliver information to us.

Essentially, what we’ll be given over the next few years will be more information, better focused to meet our specific interests and needs.

There will be very exciting opportunities for niche players to exploit these new rich veins of information and communication. There will also be risks of missing opportunities to change to new business tools and being left behind by your competitors.

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David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.