Daniel de Souza
Every year starts with numerous lists of "things to do", "to watch out for", to "pay attention on" duringthe following 12 months. For CIO's all over the world, that does not change much from place to place and from year to year. Even though such lists might be forgotten a few days after they are written down or read (especially if they are too long!), sometimes they are worth a try.
Gartner has selected a few trends analysts believe will drive many CIO strategies in 2013. I believe ten tendencies for one single year is too much, so I selected and explored three of them that I agree with the most.
Take a look.
- In-memory computing
With in-memory computing, activities that regularly take hours to be processed can be sped up to just about a few minutes or hours, and delivered to customers through cloud services. For Gartner, that can "provide transformational opportunities."
Simplifying the idea, it is a computing style by which terabyte-size datasets can be stored in the computer RAM.
Gartner believes that in-memory will have an industry impact comparable to web and the cloud. Among the industries it believes will have most impact are banking, capital markets, advertising, logistics, retail, SaaS, telecom and online gaming.
- Strategic Big Data
Big Data projects are becoming more and more strategic for the information architecture of businesses, thanks in part to the low cost servers and CPUs.
"This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions. Instead they are moving towards multiple systems [...] which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse", says Gartner.
Andrew McAfee, a a principal research scientist and associate director at the MIT Center for Digital Business, has made an interesting presentation about how can executives make sense of — and gain competitive advantage from — the tons of information available in different platforms today.
For Gartner, corporate app stores will transform completely they way IT companies focus their business. This, in the larger sense, will give birth to "apptrepreneurs" all over the world.
The research company defines an apptrepreneur as "a software entrepreneur who depends on platform providers for customer access, billing, software distribution and updates."
By 2014, Gartner believes that many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores -- so they have to prepare themselves for that during 2013.
Today, they still depend on platform providers such as the Apple App Store, salesforce.com AppExchange and Facebook. In the future, there might be other names to add to that list. The app stores will be the right place for users seeking for tools to improve their own work.
