The attendees are heading for the airport, the roadies are striking the booths and the Gartner ITxpo season ends for another year.
In retrospect, the unifying theme was the NEXUS of forces driving the next generation of IT. Not one thing, but a collision of powerful elements coming together to offer something greater than the sum of their parts. They are social, mobile, cloud and information. As Gartner Analyst Steven Prentice so eloquently put it, it’s the combination of the forces that is important, not the individual elements. Cloud is the foundation, the other three what happens within it.
Now the cynics among us would say “so what?” Isn’t this just Gartner trying to spin something new and positive after five years of cost cutting and recessionary messages? Another way to focus us on the positives and get us out of the general gloom and doom? Frankly, that would be no bad thing, and certainly a more pleasant exercise than reading headlines about how many points global markets have fallen while the show’s been running. Certainly Gartner’s early CIO and CEO surveys still have five of the top 10 CEO priorities for 2013 biased toward cost cutting. No 2: Reducing enterprise budgets. No 4: Increasing profits. Et cetera.
And yes, there’s nothing new here. We’ve all been talking mobile end enterprise cloud for ages. The difference this year seems to be momentum. Like one of those school chemistry experiments you may remember, it’s the mix of elements at the right time, in the right conditions that makes things fizz. There did seem to be a multitude of fresh and pragmatic applications here, mixed with talk of genuine growth opportunities based on digitising and socialising business elements.
People are thinking smart, looking at using business intelligence and analytics in predictive ways. No doubt, times are still tight. But instead of battening down hatches and riding out the storm, people finally seem to be concentrating on charting the course ahead.
We’ll finish our show reports with our favourite facts picked up in presentations across the three days:
1) Cloud will introduce a highly competitive market for services which will result in 20 of the top 100 services organisations falling out of the top 100 by 2014
2) 40 per cent of the workforce will be mobile by 2014
3) In less than two years, iPads will be more pervasive than BlackBerry devices
4) By 2016, 50 per cent of all non-PC devices will be purchased by employees
5) By 2015, 25 per cent of organisations will have a Chief Digital Officer
6) Through to 2018 the majority of global CEOs will be focused on growth
7) IT budgets are predicted to grow 1.5 to 2 per cent in 2013 globally
We hope you share this sense of cautious optimism. Ready to chart that course forward? Call your BT rep for a chat now.
