Businesses have been slow to trust the innovative technologies of the past few years, but according to a new study by Info-Tech Research Group, 2011 will be the year of mass adoption. The growing pains have subsided and newer technologies are now ripe and ready to go main stream.
"As budget freezes start to thaw out, end users and businesses are very actively adopting new technologies and maintaining status quo is no longer an option for IT," said Andy Woyzbun, Lead Research Analyst for Info-Tech Research Group. "IT shops will need to push the release of new and innovative technologies in 2011 in order to continue widespread growth."
The technologies every IT department should consider in 2011 are:
Social Media for business use is here to stay. Marketing departments are integrating social media into their plans without IT participation due to its rapid uptake by prospect and customers. Larger organizations are also utilizing social media platforms to improve the effectiveness of internal communications and employee-to-employee collaboration, driving superior team productivity and knowledge sharing. IT must secure privacy and integrity by creating a policy to manage organizational use of social media.
Mobile Applications are a way of life and are rapidly becoming the way to do business. Mobile devices with sophisticated capabilities such as smart phones and tablets will enable organizational differentiation through unique apps. Marketing departments have already adopted the use of mobile apps in their plans and are hiring third-party developers because many internal IT departments lack the expertise to develop and deploy mobile apps.
The Cloud is changing everything. Businesses leaders will view cloud-sourcing as a business decision rather than a technology decision. The Cloud will provide an increasing set of lower cost alternatives to in-house services, so organizations facing the need to expand the range of IT services or to add capacity should examine Cloud alternatives to in-house solutions. Whether or not the Cloud makes sense in a particular situation, Cloud solutions will become the benchmark for how management assesses the cost and quality of services provided internally by IT.
Simple Analytic Tools will propel businesses forward while saving them some cash. These cost friendly solutions are becoming wildly popular with IT leaders and business leaders alike. IT departments find they get the analytics required by the business without deploying a full Business Intelligence solution thereby putting money back into their pockets to spend on other initiatives.
Desktop Virtualization (VDI) will alleviate shoulder pain for commuters and headaches for the IT worker. As an easier to support alternative to the traditional deployment of software on PCs, VDI will allow workers to access their desktop from any computer. Early adopters say VDI payback is mainly operational (ex. Fast provisioning of new desktops and centralized application management), but licensing schemes and technology will make the VDI market ready for the next wave of desktop refreshers.
Enterprise Content Management applications will help IT shops avoid chaos in the efficient storage, control and retrieval of documents, e-mails and video. These are growing in volume and business importance. The disciplines, such as control and security, developed around operational databases must be extended to the other data collected by IT.
