The Prediction of Enterprise Tech Directions This Year

Written by GdroiD Tuesday, 18 January 2011 01:50

Straight to the point, there are four enterprise tech trends which are considered to be dominating this year, including what technologies predicted to dominate the headlines. First off, it is CLOUD COMPUTING. The vast development of technology has been witnessed by so many people around the world and everyone may agree that when United State Department of Agriculture starts seeking fortune on it, this field is about to become mainstream.

It comes with expectation that more federal, state, and local agencies to switch to Web-based applications as well as services in 2011. Accordingly, the White House has issued mandate about a ‘cloud-first’ policy and plans to reduce government data centers by 40 percent over the next five years. The private sector is also going to carry on holding the cloud too.

On one hand, Google’s Gmail for enterprise still embrace a very small portion of the entire corporate email market, whereas for Silicon Valley startups it is not only a cost-saving alternative anymore that it is not able to afford Microsoft Exchange servers. It is strengthened by Research firm IDC’s prediction that spending on public IT cloud services can grow more than 5 times the rate of IT industry in 2011, which means increase 30 percent from 2010.

The second is GAMIFICATION. Well, you should know that there are more companies that attempting to increase employee participation as well as customer engagement by picking the gamification bandwagon in 2011. It is said that industries like health care, media, and retail are already toying with game dynamics.

Next, it is related to CONSUMERIZATION. With more people predicted to bring more personal smartphones, iPads, or consumer class PCs into office, the growing latest tablet can make those workers even happier. On the contrary, this consumerization trend can wreak havoc on IT departments which are responsible with supporting and protecting an increasing number of devices and operating systems.

Lastly, speaking of SOCIAL SOFTWARE, it seems that social networking will become part of your job description in 2011. This year, the enterprise social software market is expected to rise to $769 million, up 15.7 percent from 2010 as stated by market research firm Gartner.

Many companies are going for secure, private networking software to enhance the workplace instead of Facebook. Like Dell has Chatter, IBM rolled out a new version of Lotus Connections, and SAP held collaboration application called StreamWork. Even Jive Software, Socialcast, and Socialtext are about to introduce social networking into their office.