Gartner: 10 key IT trends for 2012

If we suddenly had to decide which of the trends in IT will particularly affect the activities of commercial companies in the new year, and we would seek advice from the reputable research company Gartner, then the list would necessarily include virtualization, social networks, energy efficiency and homogeneity of networks.

On the listed trends, the list, of course, does not end there. David Capuccio, managing vice president and director of research for Gartner's infrastructure division, compiled a list of 10 major trends that can change IT and our perception of information technology in 2012.

1. The evolution of virtualization.

Virtualization ultimately forces an increasing number of companies to use their IT department as a separate business. At first, there is some danger in this, for example, following the methods and vision of only one vendor, but it’s unlikely that only one virtualization solution provider will eventually dominate. Users must have their own vision of control over the architecture and have a constantly updated strategic plan.
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2. Large amounts of data: tracking and analysis of patterns.

Over the next five years, the amount of unstructured data will grow by 80%, thereby creating a lot of problems regarding their storage and sorting. At a minimum, the value of such technologies as inline deduplication, automatic data sorting by importance (tiering) and the corresponding optimization of energy consumption in data centers will increase accordingly. In addition, the importance of high-performance solid-state drives used to optimize performance in working with data will increase. Analytical and other systems for recognizing patterns will be a serious source of income.

3. Energy Efficiency and Energy Monitoring.

Energy issues are constantly gaining weight, overtaking even the growth of infrastructure and data volumes. Tools appear to track and analyze energy consumption at the same time at various levels of the enterprise IT system. Even the first results from their use make it clear that the majority of corporate IT systems are seriously underloaded. With a low load, they, nevertheless, consume a lot of electricity. For example, a normal server, being simply turned on, but not loaded with tasks, consumes up to 65% of its maximum level of consumption. Organizations that actively use IT should be extremely clear about what computational resources they have, and for what tasks they are used, whether they are idle, demanding a constant release of money "to the wind."

4. Context-sensitive applications.

The main issue of the year is likely to be the effective use of smartphones in the business, whose popularity in the near future will only increase. Context-sensitive computing will go beyond business intelligence and become part of a common unified communications platform that combines data from social networks and mobile devices.

5. Preservation and training of personnel.

The idea that employers need to strive to ensure that employees have an interest in their work will be further developed. Especially against the background of the fact that, starting in 2011, approximately 10,000 people will retire every week in the United States over the next 19 years. And raising new employees in loyalty to the company will be a daunting task.

6. Social networks.

A new affordable and simple means of communication between individuals and groups helps citizens to unite and voice a collective opinion about organizations, products and services. The audience of social networks includes all types of users and consumers - individual citizens, groups and associations on a certain basis, and even combat formations. Together they form a new vision of interaction between companies and society. Such associations are only beginning to influence business processes in companies, but this influence will only increase in the future. At the same time, most organizations do not have a clear understanding of the strategy for working with this influence, using social networks to their advantage. In no case should we ignore social networks in 2012.

7. Consumerization.

New types of applications are developed based on the mass user, with a focus on mobile use, on access to the application not from a stationary computer, as was the case previously. In order to exploit this trend, a carefully crafted strategy is required.

8. The amount of calculations in terms of square foot.

The most effective tool for increasing the density of computations and vertical scaling of data centers is virtualization. With its proper use, the performance and workload of the average server can grow several times, thereby helping to seriously save on the space of data centers and electricity. In the development of virtualization, it is necessary to take into account two points: the number of processor cores in the servers and the statistics of energy consumption in data centers. Four- and eight-core systems will become more widespread in 2012, and this cannot be overlooked in light of the changing licensing conditions of software tools per server.

9. Cloud computing.

The relative availability of cloud computing promises great benefits to small businesses, but the main advantage of the "clouds" is still elasticity and scalability. As many of the basic IT tasks become less customized and begin to meet uniform standards (for example, e-mail), larger organizations are gaining more and more opportunities to benefit from cloud computing.

10. Convergence of infrastructure.

According to Gartner, effective infrastructure convergence is a vertical integration of servers, storage systems, and network components with software controls at the element level. This provides a basis for optimizing data center resources in order to organize their effective sharing with dynamic load changes. Systems already announced by Cisco and HP make it possible to organize a unified management of all elements of the architecture, but they have yet to appear on the market.