It looks like 2014 was a year of nothing much in the IT space. A lot of new initiatives established holding patterns, and the ever-present threat of yet another economic downturn kept budgets on a tight rein. At the same time, mobility, cloud and big data analytics continued to get knocked around as the trends that all CIOs should be investigating, but we enter 2015 not very far from where we entered 2014 - much to be done, and not much budget with which to do it.
That said, even in cost-controlled environments, CIOs are managing to do great work and deliver innovation. We asked three IT decision-makers what they felt were the biggest game changers in 2014 and what they believe we can look forward to in 2015.
Kamal Ramsingh, technology leader for Deloitte Consulting Africa, believes a number of discussions have gathered momentum in 2014, rather than a single trend making all the difference. But he says that it's the maturing of these conversations about the digital space that have started to have an impact towards the end of 2014.
Dimensional marketing
"There's a marked requirement for the enrichment of the environment, and higher levels of digital engagement in the market," he says. "What's significant is that the source of the conversation isn't IT, it's coming from business."
He says the CIO's response will be where the true impact comes in. "They need to respond to the market's demand for agility and mobility. They are under increased pressure for higher levels of customer engagement, responsiveness, usability and business value."
This shift is significant, in that the CIO's activities are being driven by the customer-facing business rather than internal IT requirements. Ramsingh believes this trend is set to continue and increase in 2015.
However, he predicts that in 2015, companies will start demanding value from the Internet of Things. "We're calling it ambient computing and we predict it will gather momentum in 2015. Multiple objects with embedded sensors will increase in volume, and big data analytics will make sense of these multiple sources of sensory data."
He says this will lead to dimensional marketing, which will use multiple data sources - both traditional and non-traditional - to focus marketing intelligence in a more structured manner. "In 2015, the pressure will be on the CIO to tap into those sources with analytics and deliver better informed insights."
He believes dimensional marketing will receive more and more focus as the market becomes tougher in the coming years.
Speed to deploy
In tackling the question of game-changing IT, Guy Saville, IT director at SA Home Loans, points out that there are always a plethora of powerful contenders for the title, mostly from the realm of business-to-consumer e-commerce. "However, that's not my field of expertise. So I prefer to limit my focus to those advances that impact SA Home Loans in our specific niche of developing and running large-scale enterprise systems."
He says that in the last year, the evolution of JavaScript and the `single-page' application has enabled the Web to mature into a fully-featured application platform. "Fast JavaScript runtimes and libraries are enabling developers to create powerful apps that run anywhere, but with the functionality, speed and rich user experience previously only possible on desktops."
He says this will be a key building block in the bigger technology wave of 'everything mobile'.
Looking at 2015, he predicts that another game-changer will be the widespread, ubiquitous adoption of virtualisation using Docker. "Docker is one of the world's most important open-source projects, to automate the deployment of large-scale enterprise applications inside software containers."
As in 2014, there will be massive shifts in how we harness technology in 2015, again, keeping up with the major challenges.
JJ Milner, Global Micro
He says with the recent commitment from Microsoft, MS software applications such as MS SQL Server become available to Docker as `catalogue services' - Docker will run native inside MS servers. This will allow users to rapidly and easily create and deploy highly distributed systems, allowing multiple applications to run autonomously on a single physical machine or across a spectrum of virtual machines.
"This addresses key CIO goals of greatly increased speed to deploy, scalability and a greatly reduced cost of management. As a powerful enabler for the attractive but difficult-to-attain business goal of platform as a pervice, Docker will enable more apps, and more powerful apps, to run more cheaply and simply on much less hardware. This holds enormous potential for companies wanting to cost-effectively extend their enterprise systems into the realms of wider consumer and mobile use," he says.
"It's difficult to pinpoint a single development from the past year that had the biggest impact on IT," says JJ Milner, chief cloud architect and founder of Global Micro. "Technology is advancing rapidly and new developments emerge constantly, and just keeping up is a task on its own."
He highlights privacy concerns, cloud security, the Internet of things, mobility and social networking as topics of dinner party conversation throughout the year and suggests that we're likely to see further developments in these areas in 2015. However, from his company's perspective, it was encouraging to see increased adoption of cloud computing in 2014, as it indicates that South African businesses are maturing when it comes to their IT infrastructure.
"According to recent Microsoft research, 50% of enterprises will have deployed hybrid cloud by the end of 2017 and 45% of total IT services spend will be on cloud services by 2020. The bigger vendors are starting to change their business models and are beginning to understand what wasn't working in their adoption of cloud and promotion of services in the past."
Looking at 2015, Milner says we're likely to see an increase in integration specialisation, especially with the increased use of cloud computing by businesses. "Typical SMEs use five to six core applications. Bigger companies can use upwards of 30. So now there is a demand for a service that will help all these applications talk to each other."
Diversification
He also believes we'll see more service provider consolidation in 2015 as vendors start offering more 'services as a service', such as encryption. "This diversification will possibly result in channel conflict as it will be easier to move workloads between service providers. As in 2014, there will be massive shifts in how we harness technology in 2015 and, again, keeping up will be the major challenge," he says.
While the technologies and opportunities highlighted in this article are complex and varied, the one common thread in all the discussions is that game-changing is becoming synonymous with delivery. The industry and the business world will not and cannot tolerate technology for technology's sake, and implementations and innovations are being delivered in response to real business needs.
First published in the January 2015 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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