Technology Trends for 2012

The big technology trends in 2012 will be extensions of trends that began in 2011 or earlier.  For example, BottomlineIT noted the Consumerization of IT  back in September. Expect it to pick up speed in 2012. Similarly you read about The Internet of Things here back in February. That too will drive technology trends in 2012.

The big IT research firms published their trends projections for 2012. You can find Gartner’s here.  Maybe more interesting to a CIO will be IDC’s security trends for 2012 here.

The tech trends below are based on the numerous vendor briefings and conferences BottomlineIT attends as well as talking with dozens of IT and business managers. Most shouldn’t surprise you if you have been reading BottomlineIT, but a few might.

Here are the technology trends for 2012:

BYOD—smartphones mainly and other devices. The twist is the growing adoption of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) in which workers are encouraged to bring their personal smartphones to work while IT will be asked to support a range of popular devices, selectively open interfaces to data and applications, and insist on a certain level of security, such as data encryption. The business will have to resolve reimbursement issues, currently policies vary from zero to all.

Social Networking for Business—will only grow in the coming year.  Social networking is the way the next generation of workers live and increasingly work.  Businesses will want to identify and capitalize on opportunities in social networking starting with collaboration.

The Internet of Things—the digital transformation of the economy continues as chips are embedded in more things from consumer appliances to packaging materials, allowing companies to meter and monitor processes and activity. RFID is just the start. Watch for more digital instrumentation appearing.

 Automated, Real-time Data Analytics—a part of the Big Data trend. Expect to see the growing adoption of advanced data analytics, which increasingly will be automated to keep up with the high volume and in near-real time to allow for dynamic data-based decision-making. And the analytics will be baked in, relieving the business from having to maintain a stable of PhD quants.

Bio-metric Authentication—passwords provide poor security. Watch for increased adoption of bio-metrics in the form of fingerprints, retina scans, facial/voice recognition, and such to replace the use of passwords for authentication.

The Cloud goes Mainstream—most companies will develop a cloud strategy at some level, whether for backup to the cloud, SaaS, to augment existing capabilities, or something else.

Virtualized Enterprise—look for increasing virtualization of every digital aspect of the enterprise, from data networking to voice communications.

Solid state memory for storage—in one form or another solid state memory will be an increasing part of almost every storage strategy as costs continue to drop and vendors get better at integrating it into the products to boost performance.

Further out:

Electronic Wallets—smart devices, including smartphones, used for almost anything from buying a can of soda to proving who you are. Big vendors already are fighting over who provides the e-wallet. Think you worry about security now? This merits close scrutiny.

Geo-Location—between smart devices and GPS look for businesses increasingly to take advantage of geographic data, first for marketing (combined with QR codes) and then much more.

In-memory Computing—combining processing with memory speeds performance.  Expect to see entire databases processed in memory.

Gamification—applying aspects of computer gaming to business software offers the possibility of more compelling and engaging business applications.  Could ERP be improved through gamification? For sure.

However things shake out, 2012 should be an interesting year for technology, and BottomlineIT will stay on top of it.

Extending the Digital Transformation of the Economy with IPv6

In case you missed it, there is a digital transformation of the economy underway and IT plays a central part. BottomlineIT first talked about this digital transformation earlier this year. The Internet of things is part of it, but it goes much further. You can see it with the proliferation of digital capabilities in just about everything you do—in your new car, in appliances you buy, in the instrumenting of business processes of all types.

Behind this digital transformation is the Internet, which is the medium across and through all these digital bits travel. Ultimately every item, everything with an RFID tag, every smartphone, anything needing Internet access will need an IP address. And as the Internet currently is configured, it is running out of IP addresses. That’s the problem Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses.

A survey of U.S. technology and business decision makers by IT industry association CompTIA  found 31% of respondents believe the transition to will be mostly smooth. BottomlineIT agrees mainly because for a while at least, the big Internet providers will use masking and address translation techniques to cover up the issue. But at some point, companies will have to incorporate IPv6 when they upgrade their communications equipment.

Jeff Doyle, president of Jeff Doyle and Associates, explains the problem like this: “When the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the top-level address management agency, allocated the last of its address pool to the five worldwide Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) on February 3, the clock started ticking in earnest. We expect the RIRs to use up those last addresses by late summer. So what then?”

Well, for one thing the Internet is NOT going to come to a crashing halt. As noted above, there are techniques that the big Internet providers can use to fudge the problem for a while. The sky is not falling.

Still, if the Internet is important to your business you will need a plan to deal with this issue at some point. That plan simply may be a budget allocation to replace your current networking and communication equipment with IPv6-capable equipment sooner rather than later. If the Internet is critical to your business, an in-depth risk analysis also might be undertaken.

Ultimately, you will have to upgrade your networking and communications systems for IPv6, but you may not have to lift a finger. As you buy new network equipment in the course of a normal technology refresh, the vendors will have made the upgrade for you and built it in. Cisco has been leading the charge on this, but the other vendors are following right along. Equipment for the small office/home office (SOHO) market appears slower to follow but these vendors too will incorporate IPv6 in their products.

In terms of applications, Microsoft has incorporated IPv6 support into its Windows stack for releases from Vista on.  But again, other vendors are following right along. A partial list of IPv6-compliant applications can be found here.

How big a change is IPv6? Let’s look at the numbers: Compared to IPv4, the current standard that supports 2³²(4,294,967,296) unique addresses, IPv6 supports 2¹²⁸ (approximately 340 Undecillion) addresses. That’s eight orders of magnitude greater than trillion. It’s tempting to say that society will never use that many addresses, but given the Internet of Things, who knows? IPv6 also provides new technical features revolving around assigning and managing Internet addresses.

There will be different IPv6 transition strategies, according to CompTIA, depending on the priorities, needs, and capabilities of each organization. Those with high demand for IP address, mainly Internet service providers and wireless carriers, already should be on top of the issue. Most companies, however, needn’t worry at all. The complete transition to IPv6 is expected to take five years or more.

The CompTIA survey found that just over half (56%) of respondents indicated they are following news on IPv6 and 30% have conducted research into the implications. However, only 21% have actually performed network upgrades while nearly one-third (31%) have done nothing at all. BottomlineIT’s recommendation: unless you are a huge consumer of IP addresses you’ve already done what you need for now simply by reading this piece. You can safely wait until you go through your normal equipment, system, and application refreshes.

A more productive use of your IPv6 thinking might be pondering what new things you can do when you have access to a seemingly unlimited number of unique IP addresses.

Virtualization changes the economics of IT

To most business managers the IT function is a cost center to be minimized. Gartner Data Center conference attendees in December, reportedly, overflowed a session on reducing data center costs. An audience poll at the session, however, showed that about 20% of the audience had no IT cost accounting in place at all, and over half the attendees were basically flying blind on their IT budgets. They had, in effect, no way to control IT costs.

With personnel making up about 38% of IT costs the surest way to cut IT expenses is to cut people, Gartner noted. Another suggestion: buy cheaper IT hardware.

Inna Kuznetsova, Vice President, IBM Systems Software, in a recent analyst briefing, suggests there is a different way to change the economics of IT. The key: virtualization. Even basic virtualization using x86-based servers can deliver 8:1 server consolidation, which can save $600 per server in energy costs alone. Virtualizing on IBM’s eX5 x86-based servers can get you 78% more virtual machines for the same license cost, the company reports.

The rapid digital transformation of the global economy is putting IT infrastructures at companies everywhere under great pressure.  From 2007 to this year, digital data is projected to grow by a factor of 10. Compounding that challenge is the growth of unstructured data, which will make up 80% of the digital data growth and is one factor fueling interest in the advanced analytics, which is needed to make sense of that kind of data.

The scale of this digital transformation is astounding.  Six TB of information is exchanged over the Internet every second! The number of devices connected to the Internet by the end of this year will reach 10¹². Driving this is the emergence of the Internet of Things, which BottomlineIT previously covered here.

Certainly shrinking the IT technology footprint through consolidation and reducing IT staff remain key to lowering costs, but technology virtualization, noted Kuznetsova, is the best way to get there. By 2013, she reports that 69% of all server workloads will be virtualized.

Kuznetsova sees a four-step journey to new, improved IT economics through virtualization:

1. Start with server virtualization but extend it to storage and networks, which also can be virtualized and consolidated. Through IT resource virtualization organizations can boost efficiency and increase the utilization of IT, which boosts ROI.
2. Manage workloads to further improve staff productivity or reduce staff. This will require integrated systems management tools that enable you to increase server, storage, and network resource-to-staff ratios.  Where it took one storage admin to manage 10 TB of storage, that admin could now handle 100 TB or more through a virtualized IT infrastructure.
3. Deploy automation to achieve consistent and repeatable processes.  This not only further reduces staffing requirements but enables IT to consistently meet business service levels.
4. Optimize IT delivery to enable business agility. Ideally this will take the form of user self-provisioning.  Self-provisioning is feasible due to the flexibility of virtualized IT resources, which are not constrained by physical barriers or location. A business manager, for example, can use easy templates to self-provision a new server in minutes to support a new business initiative.

Of course, IBM offers tools, like IBM Systems Director or Tivoli, to assist at every step in this virtualization journey. Other vendors are heading there too, including HP, EMC, Oracle/Sun, and others.

Virtualization lies at the core of cloud computing. A progression through Kuznetsova’s virtualization-driven steps invariably leads you to the cloud. At that point you decide how much cloud is right for your organization.

 

The Internet of Things

The Internet of things has the potential to change our businesses and our lives as much as or possibly more than today’s Internet. It has been a long time in coming, maybe since the advent of bar codes but certainly since the development of RFID tags.

Among the recognized thought leaders is McKinsey. You can check out a piece they posted last March here.  IBM has a five-minute video that introduces it here.

The Internet of things is another aspect of the digital transformation of the world. IBM has given it the Smarter Planet label. Others call it the global digital nervous system.  It is the collection of devices, phones, computers, sensors, and more that are continuously capturing and communicating digitized information. And once that information is digitized we can begin to do something with it. What kind of information do you need to advance your business objectives?

When IBM talks about the Smarter Planet it is talking about the Internet of Things. IBM sees it as the intelligence being infused into the systems and processes that make the world work—into things no one would recognize as computers: cars, appliances, roadways, power grids, clothes, even natural systems such as agriculture and waterways.

Would your business like to know how people actually use your products? It might change the way you create, design, build, and market. Of course you could approximate some of this information through focus groups, but they are costly and imperfect. Sensors built into your products and communicating back to you about how they are actually being used would give you the real story.

RFID (Radio Frequency ID) is steadily altering the supply chain. The time when every consumer product has an RFID tag remains some time away, but the technology is being widely adopted in the back room, the back lot, on the shipping dock, and more. That’s the Internet of Things.

Smartphones, WiFi, wireless communications of all types are fueling the Internet of Things. The number of smartphone users soon will be in the hundreds of millions. Each smartphone can be a sensor on the Internet of Things.

Pretty soon, for example, people will use smartphones to purchase a can of soda from a vending machine; that’s the Internet of Things. These phones will be generating presence sensing data, GPS data, motion data, transaction data, and more. Would your marketing department like to know when someone walks into a place selling your product? Better yet, what if they pick up your product and then start to put it down! (Remember, some smartphones sense motion and direction.)

The Internet of Things gets exponentially bigger when digitized surveillance data is added to it. Think of the various CSI and NCSI cop shows where the good guys grab digital video from various surveillance cameras and combine it with blueprints of buildings and schematics. That is Hollywood make-believe today but clearly points to the Internet of Things, a digitally transformed world where vast information is sensed, metered, captured, communicated, and could be available at the click of a button.

Even before then the demand for IP addresses is pushing the capability of today’s Internet to accommodate  new addresses. To meet what will is shaping up as insatiable demand for IP addresses, the Internet will shortly be adopting IPv6.  That should take care of IP  addresses for the rest of any of our lifetimes and beyond.

What will be needed to succeed in that world is excellent analytics—fast real-time analytics that grab the right information and spew out accurate analyses fast. Are you prepared?