News Feature | October 21, 2014

Gartner Identifies Top Ten Tech Trends

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

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At the Recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2014, analysts presented their top ten strategic technology trends for 2015, according to a press release.

“We have identified the top 10 technology trends that organizations cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning processes,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the trends at the same rate, but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years.”

Gartner defined a strategic technology trend as having “the potential for significant impact on the organization in the next three years,” including “a high potential for disruption to the business, end users or IT, the need for a major investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.” These are technologies that affect an organizations long-term initiatives, programs, or blueprints.

Gartner’s top 10 trends are:

  • An Expanded computing environment: With the proliferation of mobile devices, there will be an increased opportunity to capitalize on those mobile users in increasingly diverse contexts.
  • The Internet of Things: The role of the IoT is increasing everywhere, but it is having a particular impact on manufacturing.
  • 3D Printing: Not only is demand for 3D printing on the rise in manufacturing and healthcare, recently a 3D printer was sent into space for testing.
  • Advanced, Pervasive, and Invisible Analytics: “Every app now needs to be an analytic app,” said Cearley. “Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.”
  • Context-Rich Systems: Context-aware analytics, which apply deep analytics to particular contexts of data, are the trend of the future. Applications that understand the context of a user request can thus adjust responses and information delivery accordingly.
  • Smart Machines: Gartner states that “the smart machine era will be the most disruptive era in the history of IT.”
  • The Convergence Of Cloud And Mobile Computing: According to Gartner, “In the near term, the focus for cloud/client will be on synchronizing content and application state across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices.” The second-screen phenomenon will be the wave of future technology for enhanced performance.
  • Software-Defined Applications And Infrastructure: Basically, the demands of agile programming had created a shift from static to dynamic models of computing, including rules, models, and code that dynamically build and configure elements at all steps of the computing process.
  • Web-Scale IT: This delivers the capabilities of large cloud services within an enterprise IT setting. Gartner asserts, “The first step toward the Web-scale IT future for many organizations should be DevOps — bringing development and operations together in a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous incremental development of applications and services.”
  • Risk-Based Security And Self-Protection: Gartner asserts that organizations need to begin applying more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools, using multi-faceted security-aware applications. Ultimately, “perimeters and firewalls are no longer enough; every app needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.”