Four Big Trends Changing Computing, Gartner Says

Cloud computing, social computing, context-aware computing, and pattern-based strategy are the four trends that will influence IT over the next few years, according to Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of Research for Gartner (News - Alert) in a report from PC Magazine.

Speaking at Gartner Symposium, Sondergaard said it usually takes about 10 years from when a technology appears until it really changes business. He gave examples of the PC, mobile phone, and Internet. He noted that while the IBM (News - Alert) PC appeared in 1981, it didn't reach an installed base of 100 million units until 1990. Now there are 1.4 billion PCs installed, which he said should rise to more than 2 billion by 2015.

The first analog mobile phone came out in 1983; mobile phones didn't reach 100 million units until 1996; and now there are more than 4 billion units installed (and over 10 billion have been sold). Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee sent the first Web request; by late 1996, there were less than half a million websites; but today there are 250 million sites and 1.8 billion Web users. By 2012, he said, the Internet will be 75 times larger than it was in 2002.

"Like it or not, we are on our way to an IT-driven intelligence society," he said. Global IT traffic is doubling every 2 years, and the information we create is moving from 275 exabytes per year to 275 exabytes per day by 2020, he said.

"Information will be the oil of the 21st century," Sondergaard said. Cloud computing will lower prices and change business as well as technology, he predicted.

Social computing will blur the lines between enterprise and personal computing, and social networking within and between organizations will massively improve productivity, he added.

Context-aware computing means many more connected devices with sensors that understand the location, language, feelings and dreams of consumers by using patterns to determine your desires. Pattern-based strategy uses predictive analytics on both structured and unstructured data, but it's more about a business framework that lets users seek and model patterns, and then adapt accordingly. This is based on pattern-based technologies, such as predictive analytics.

But while IT budgets grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $2.4 trillion now, overall, they aren't growing very fast, he said. The budgets are expected to only reach $2.8 trillion in five years. Most of the growth, he said, is in emerging markets, such as Asia Pacific and Latin America.

He said that while IT departments have been internally focused on optimizing processes and costs for the past 20 years, now it was more about business processes. And he said that while the IT vendor industry is changing -- through mergers and acquisitions creating "supervendors" -- the four big trends in IT directions will bring this strategy into question.