Fundamental Changes Ahead for IT in 2012

IDEAS has identified several major topics that are likely to dominate the attention of IT managers throughout 2012, including the continued rise of cloud computing, the diversification of client devices, and the next stage in the evolution of server designs and storage systems. Some developments will be incremental and fairly predictable; other developments will fundamentally change the course of the industry, as organizations adopt public cloud services for a growing number of workloads, and as users shift from traditional PCs to tablets and other mobile devices for more and more client applications. IDEAS analysts expect the following ten developments to unfold in 2012.

IDEAS Top 10 Predictions for IT Industry in 2012

• User concern will grow about lock-in with public cloud service vendors.
• IT workers will start confronting an acute need to retrain for cloud-computing skills.
• The public cloud business will undergo a shakeout. 
• Some systems vendors will reconsider their client strategies in order to strengthen server positions.
• Rejuvenated PCs will underscore their importance for critical computing tasks.
• Growing use of solid-state drives (SSDs) will start blurring boundaries between server memory caches and storage.
• Simplified and automated storage management will break out in emerging world markets.
• Unified storage will become a requirement for entry-level and midrange customers.
• Systems vendors will step up efforts to differentiate themselves with integrated software stacks.
• Software-defined networking (SDN) will start to get attention.

At the beginning of the year, IDEAS analysts collected their thoughts on the key trends that are poised to play out across the IT industry over the next 12 months. The analysts identified several major topics that are likely to dominate the attention of IT managers throughout 2012, including the continued rise of cloud computing, the diversification of client devices, and the next stage in the evolution of server designs and storage systems. Some developments will be incremental and fairly predictable. Other developments could fundamentally change the course of the industry, as organizations adopt public cloud services for a growing number of workloads, and as users shift from traditional PCs to tablets and other mobile devices for more and more client applications.

In 2012, IDEAS predicts the following:

• Customers will become increasingly concerned with the possibility of lock-in from cloud service providers as those customers grapple with the decision of whether to embrace proprietary cloud solutions that deliver unique benefits, or adopt more open solutions that may have limitations.
• IT workers will start to discover an acute need to reassess their skills in order to reap the benefits of cloud computing; new skill needs may require workers to seek out training in new areas.
• Public cloud consolidation will continue as larger, better-financed companies cherry-pick the best smaller companies and push out the weaker start-ups.
• Vendors that enjoy strong visibility in the client device market (such as smartphones, mobile PCs and tablets) will be able to translate this presence into success in the area of back-end cloud services. This trend will cause traditional server-focused vendors, such as Oracle or IBM, to rethink their client strategies to try to pick up some of this more-consumer-oriented business.
• New x86 processors, coupled with a major push from Microsoft with the release of Windows 8, will help to rejuvenate interest in PCs by underscoring their importance for many critical computing tasks. Intel's next processor will deliver a quantum leap in performance for the mobile systems that use them, including PC laptops and other devices, and its arrival could impact the mobile market to the same degree that Westmere and Nehalem impacted servers in 2011.
• Solid-state drives (SSDs) will be much more widely deployed, and in a variety of ways: on many clients, directly attached to servers, and within storage arrays. IT architects will start to rethink their data storage and caching approaches as they consider whether SSDs are more effective when deployed close to processors as large caches directly attached to servers, or as added tiers in storage devices. Systems vendors that can offer storage management software that spans both servers and storage arrays, thus addressing both uses cases for SSDs with an integrated solution, will break out from the pack.
• Vendors will step up efforts to simplify and automate storage management as they focus increasingly on emerging world markets (such as BRIC and CIVETS countries). In particular, automated storage tiering solutions, which arbitrate how classes of data are assigned to high-performance SSD pools, will extend into the small and midsize business (SMB) space.
• Unified storage, which manages block and file storage using a single interface, will become a common requirement for entry-level and midrange customers.
• IT infrastructures will continue to become standardized, with increasingly critical workloads deployed on x86 servers and industry-standard operating systems such as Linux and Windows. This standardization means systems vendors will find it harder than ever to establish meaningful differentiation in hardware; as a result, they will go further than ever before to vertically integrate their platforms with unique and proprietary software stacks that are specifically optimized for their server platforms.
• Software-defined networking (SDN) will start to get some attention in 2012, as developers find that they can achieve more deterministic network behavior, and hence higher performance, by integrating network switching directly with applications.

Over the next few weeks, IDEAS will post several follow-up blogs that review the key drivers for these developments in more detail.