Cloud, mobile and social technologies are forcing the information technology industry to effectively ‘hit the reset button’ to meet a pace of change that businesses and organisations are facing. As these new technologies mesh with new demands for greater information access, and force industry leaders to continually reinvent themselves, applications development and deployment solution provider Progress predicts five major technology trends that will shape the year ahead for the industry. 1. The Internet of Things does not make for one big happy IT family.
While developers and IT decision makers already have their hands full with changes complicated by the sheer number of smart phones
and tablets and BYOD (bring your own device) policies, they are in for a surprise. The ‘Internet of Things’ – composed of wearable
personal technology, smart consumer and medical devices, as well as connected machines and sensors located all around the planet –
is about to make the challenge even greater. The nearly unlimited addresses provided by the adoption of IPv6 will ignite an explosion of new data that must be harnessed, meaning
scalability and complexity will take on new meaning. Furthermore,
ever improving “smarts” will mean device-to-device “conversations”
will start to become more important than user “conversations.”
2. Analytics moves to the forefront.
Analytics will finally stop being an afterthought in 2014. For
decades, job one was connection, data movement, and immediate
application functionality. Except where analytics was the application,
analytics was an add-on, a ‘nice to have.’ The accelerating data
tsunami –powered by the Internet of Things and the growing
recognition of the potential value of all data — means that
developers must build in analytics from the start, making it an
inherent aspect of information technology delivery and making
context-sensitive and location-aware capabilities ubiquitous.
3. When it comes to apps, everyone’s paying attention.
While the performance and usability of large, publicly visible
projects, especially in healthcare, have drawn growing scrutiny,
increased adoption of model-driven, democratised and user-based
development, will also drive high expectations for application delivery.
This will lead to increased adoption of new rapid development tools
and practices to speed delivery, increase predictability and reliability,
meet stringent service-level requirements, and control costs.
4. The IT budget shift.
The prevalence of the cloud and democratised development
trends present many new options, especially for individual lines of
business – which will increasingly seek to control their own destiny
by funding their own projects or wresting money from IT.
As a result, businesses – and CIOs – will need to find ways to adopt
and adapt without losing control of information, encouraging
security risks, or taking new directions that could lead to technical
dead-ends or expensive rework in the future. In an era of very rapid
transformation, they must stay ahead of this curve and take the lead.
5. PaaS goes mainstream.
Platform-as-a-Service finally goes mainstream in 2014. This cloud
layer will become the choice for many businesses and IT decision
makers because it supports better and faster development, agility,
analytics, cloud-based cost-advantages and vast scalability.
Providing structure and control that meets the near-term and
strategic needs of management will further accelerate adoption.
The capabilities available through a PaaS will drive further changes.
‘Whether it’s the Internet of Things, big data, cloud or mobility,
businesses are in for accelerating change in 2014,’ Karen Tegan Padir,
chief technology officer at Progress, commented. ‘The successful
organisation will take a good look at the needs of the end-user first
– creating an empowerment profile for each group – and providing
them with the tools they need to be productive and efficient.’
‘One size will no longer fit all. For some, that will mean deploying
a PaaS for rapid application development, for others that will mean
launching an enterprise app store for apps in a secure environment.
