According to some, 2012 will bring another global economic crisis. Others predict a more literal cataclysm, involving a little fire and a lot of brimstone. Andrew Collins talks to the experts to sort the nonsense from the reality, finding out what trends and technologies will influence your IT department in the year to come.
Generally speaking, 2012 will be a period of economic uncertainty, thanks in no small part to the threat of further aftershocks from the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.
According to Matt Oostveen, Analyst at IDC, this economic uncertainty will require “intelligent spending” on IT from Australian companies, lest another global recession hits.
ICT spending shouldn’t drop, however - don’t think that Oostveen is leaping aboard the doom and gloom bandwagon, he’s just saying that you’ll need to be smarter with your money in the coming year. He even appeals to the time-honoured adage of ‘IT must do more, with less’, but says it will be even more applicable in 2012 than in previous years.
To help with that intelligent spending, let’s take a look at what you’ve got in front of you in the year ahead.
Mobility
Mobility is the real lightning rod for predictions this year, with all of the analysts forecasting great growth in this area.
Mobility is not a new concept - it’s been kicking around for some years. Kevin Noonan, analyst at Ovum, reckons that we saw an “inkling” of change that mobility can bring in 2011, but that in the coming year it will grow much more rapidly.
The Queensland floods of late 2010 and early 2011 are highly relevant in this discussion. Noonan says the Qlq Police Twitter and Facebook sites provided “a great example of just how far the community has moved in terms of looking for mobile services”.
“We had a point where really the [Qld Police] Facebook and Twitter sites were the official source of information,” Noonan says.
This presence from the Queensland authorities was accompanied by contributions by those in the flooded areas, at first giving simple status updates on specific regions, and later sharing survival advice like how to clean up after the flood hit, and where to find fresh water and charge your mobile phone.
Noonan says this leads to the question of whether 2012 will be “the year of the rise of the digital citizen”.
On top of indicators like the public’s mobile response to the Queensland floods, Noonan says penetration levels of smartphones have reached a point where people using social media are “moving from machine to machine, pretty much grabbing whatever’s closest, and continuing to talk about whatever thought comes into their head. People aren’t differentiating [between means to get onto social media] anymore.”
Given this surge of interest in mobility, 2012 may see a “redrawing of the boundaries between corporate IT and personal IT”.
“In the past, the model that we had was high-tech government, high-tech enterprise, delivering services to what’s essentially a low-tech citizen, who consumed things either on paper or went to a website as probably the [highest tech] thing that they did,” Noonan says.
“We now can start to see that boundary shifting. This is really just the thin end of that wedge that we’ve seen in 2011.”
Specifically, Noonan says that corporate IT will move from “transaction-oriented” ways of dealing with customers, to “conversations”.
Teller machines provide an example of this change. Traditionally, bank customers will turn up unannounced at an ATM, card in hand, ready to withdraw some cash.
“You’ve got no idea when they’re going to turn up, you’ve got no relationship really, they just turn up and look for money,” Noonan says.
“A conversation is where you use social networking and mobile computing to have an understanding of the sorts of things that that customer wants, and so you start to predict their requirements,” he says.
This concept of the conversation has already given us the Woolworths mobile app, which is “having a conversation with people about what groceries they want to buy, so by the time they turn up at the shop, there’s already a whole lot of market intelligence that [Woolworths has] already been able to glean”.
“Also in this last year we’ve seen a flood of corporate mobile apps coming out that have really taken apps out of the ‘fun and the funky’ sort of stage, into something serious in the way of talking to citizens,” Noonan says.
Noonan stresses that this growth in mobility is “not pie in the sky”.
“In 2011 we’ve already seen the first examples of it happening,” he says.
This general growth in mobility will be reflected in the workplace, with organisations employing smartphones and tablets to improve processes. But IDC’s Oostveen reckons that there’s more to it than enterprises simply introducing a few tablets into the office.
“Mobility will come of age in 2012. It’s now at a point where the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are starting to come together,” he says.
Lots of Australian companies are looking at making real use of tablets, Oostveen says. All you have to do is look at the @works listed in this very magazine, and its recent issues, to see different ways organisations are putting tablets and smartphones to intelligent use.
In particular, bring your own device (BYOD) - the trend of allowing employees to introduce their own mobile devices into the company’s IT environment - will rise in 2012.
Kevin McIsaac, analyst at IBRS, says this will mostly be in the form of smartphones coming into the company IT environment.
Interestingly, McIsaac says the rise of BYOD has little to do with cost savings. BYOD policies will become more prevalent in Australian organisations because of pressure from users, who tend to have more advanced consumer devices that provide a “substantially better user experience” than those supplied by their companies.
“Those folks are now saying: I demand that level of IT. And IT is actually in a reactive mode, very often, responding to that demand. It’s not about saving money. It’s about giving the users what they want.
“It usually comes down to one very simple thing: the company’s providing BlackBerrys, and the user wants to use their iPhone,” he says.
Similarly, many organisations will allow users’ tablets in the IT environment simply because board members want to use their own iPads at work. Who wants to say no to their chief officers?
But while the desire is there, implementing these changes won’t be easy. Introducing a BYOD strategy means confronting a lot of tough challenges, such as which mobile operating systems to support, whether or not corporate SIMs are issued to users, and a raft of security threats including hacking, malware and IP theft from staff.
But none of these challenges are insurmountable - they can be overcome and are simply part of the path to employing several potentially highly disruptive technologies. (For a lot more on this topic, see page TK.)
The cloud
Like mobility, the cloud is a concept that has bounced around for a few years, without seeing mass adoption. But unlike mobility, the future of the cloud in 2012 is murky.
Prior to 2011, the cloud was considered by many to be hype and was greeted by many customers with scepticism.
But in the last year, Noonan says, “We’ve seen large amounts of money and effort being put on the table by vendors.
“As we go into 2012, we can no longer talk about cloud being hype. There’s simply too much money being invested on the vendor side. So this is either going to fall flat or it’s going to start to pick up at the customer end,” he says.
Organisations have already dabbled with the cloud on a small scale, but now they really need to start thinking about how cloud fits into their strategy.
“It’s now the time of decision for CIOs on cloud,” he says.
This uncertain future hasn’t been helped by the confusion that has so far surrounded the cloud and what it means. And according to IBRS’s McIsaac, confusion still reigns. But even with this confusion, McIsaac says that infrastructure-as-a-service, at least, could see increased adoption this year.
“What I am seeing is a genuine interest, and some tentative, explorative steps from a few people, and a couple of big deals,” he says.
McIsaac cites Westpac’s 2011 deal for email-as-a-service from Fujitsu, which he says signals that the cloud can be used at scale, as a serious long-term proposition. It shows that the cloud is starting to move from hype to reality for large enterprises, he reckons.
IDC’s Oostveen says “everything communications” - including messaging, presence, mobile, PABX, collaboration, conferencing, and so on - will move to the cloud. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are likely to get the most out of adopting these services.
“This is bad news for some traditional vendors but good news for customers that want flexibility in commercial terms in pricing and contract periods to faster ROI,” he says.
Oostveen reckons a few top 100 companies may also jump on board with cloud-based communications, but most of the action will take place in SMBs.
Green IT and the carbon tax
IDC’s Oostveen says that in the coming year, green IT will be back on the agenda, thanks to the Australian carbon tax, set to come into effect in July 2012. In order to avoid the tax, companies will look to adopting technologies that increase the energy efficiency of their data centres.
“Energy efficiency is back on the table. But it’s only back for fiscal reasons,” he says.
That may seem confusing - after all, wasn’t green IT all about cost savings the first time around? Oostveen says that while cost savings was an element to green IT in the past, it wasn’t necessarily the only driving force.
Federal government agencies, in particular, had to adopt green technologies, following a mandate from the government itself that they become more sustainable.
Plus, some organisations went green to appear more ‘ecofriendly’ in the eyes of their customers, and the public at large. And while this corporate citizenship branding can indirectly lead to fiscal benefits, the carbon tax has established a much more direct link between green technologies and cost savings.
Ovum’s perspective on the carbon tax and green IT is more cautious. Noonan actually says sustainability is the “dark horse” of IT predictions in 2012.
“The real question is whether sustainability starts to be a standalone issue in its own right. Right now, every time we talk about sustainability, we’re really talking about cost savings,” he says.
But in 2012, sustainability “may be linked more to an overall productivity agenda”.
Take the idea of working from home. Separating workers from their workstations and allowing them to work from home can be considered a green initiative - it can result in lower overall carbon emissions, as workers won’t be driving their gas-guzzlers to the office. But it’s not necessarily any cheaper for the company than having them come into work.
So while green, remote working is usually undertaken to increase productivity.
Such productivity-increasing green measures may see higher uptake in 2012, but there are no guarantees, Noonan says.
Telecoms and networks
The structural separation of Telstra, which will see the telco turn off its copper and cable access networks and transfer ownership of the last mile to NBN Co, will have to major consequences going into 2012.
Firstly, Oostveen says, it will accelerate the rollout of next-generation mobile broadband, particularly LTE, which promises faster speeds than the DSL and cable alternatives. Carriers will bundle these plans with more value-added services, like backup and storage.
Secondly, as a means of attaining some differentiation from competitors, carriers will offer IT services on top of network access, including cloud computing, security and collaboration offerings. This, Oostveen says, “will create a new era of direct competition” in this market.