10 key strategic technologies of 2014 according to Gartner

In October, Gartner published its annual list of “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for the Next Year”. Interestingly, Big Data is no longer there. For 2014, the list was:

1. Mobile Device Management

Gartner states 2 (or, possibly, even 3) fold increase in the number of mobile workstations due to the further spread in corporations of the approach to the use of employees' mobile devices in the workflow “bring your own device (BYOD)”. The most important task in this area over the next 5 years will be the unification of mobile business platforms, as there is currently a very large variety of configurations (processor, memory, screen size, etc.) in this area, which makes it difficult to make universal products for business. The main problem in this area will be determining the optimal balance between the benefits of this approach from the IT point of view and from the point of view of information security (corporate data processed on employees' mobile devices).

2. Mobile applications

The market for mobile applications will grow, and the applications themselves will become more complex. Java Script and HTML5 will be the main technologies for developing enterprise applications. It is assumed that there will be an evolution of the user interface of mobile applications from an approach that focuses on emotions and user actions, to an approach that changes patterns of user behavior. An example would be, for example, various mobile geolocation information services for smartphones or Google Glass.

3. “Internet of Things”

The idea is to make more and more things manageable over the web. As the main idea of this strategic technology, Gartner calls the unification of 4 components: people, information, things and geolocation information (the latter means the future mass distribution of GPS sensors embedded in various devices).
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4. Hybrid clouds and IT-like-broker-cloud-services

It is already obvious that in the foreseeable future there will be many cloud providers (they will be different in size and in the type of cloud services provided). Many companies are currently choosing a combined approach when choosing clouds, jointly using private and public clouds. At the same time, various types of clouds used in a particular company will need to be integrated into a single IT infrastructure of the enterprise, and the information contained in them will be uniformly processed and analyzed. Gartner expects the growth of technologies that perform the functions of integration and aggregation of clouds of different types.

5. Client-cloud architecture

Active distribution of mobile applications leads to the spreading of the client-cloud architecture, which differs from the client-server architecture with at least two essential properties: (1) the client and the cloud are separated by a WAN network section (there may be a large network delay, paid traffic, limited channel width) and (2) as a client platform, a mobile device is used (that is, the client has limited processor, memory and disk resources, and developers are required to use energy-efficient algorithms). Gartner expects a summary of engineering and technology expertise in this field of information processing.

6. The era of personal clouds

People have more and more personal devices, most of them are connected to personal clouds (Dropbox, Google drive, Yandex disk, mail servers, etc.). In this case, many people already now use several devices connected to the personal cloud at once, and none of these devices is the “main” one in terms of data storage. Thus, there is a transition of the role of the data storage center from personal devices to the personal cloud.

7. All data center resources will become programmable.

Gartner argues that it is time to introduce the term "SDx" - a collective concept that means the ability to program any type of infrastructure (computing, network, storage). Currently, this includes: SDN (network), SDDC (data center), SDS (storage) and SDI (infrastructure). The task of 2014 next year is to develop standards in this area to facilitate the implementation of SDx in data centers with the possibility of effective interaction between them, which is in great demand in the context of the development of various types of cloud services.

8. Web-Scale IT

Gartner defines “Web-scale IT” in a rather abstract way: “the concept of providing scalable cloud services for corporations anywhere in the world through public networks”. The concept includes 6 elements: data centers, a web-based service delivery architecture, programmable management, flexible business processes, collaboration-oriented technologies, and the corporate culture of a “learning organization.” Gartner foresees the further development of this concept, and also notes that it is global cloud service providers (and not corporations) that currently determine the development strategy for this direction.

9. "Smart cars"

Gartner expects this new trend to become quite famous in 2014. Smart machines are intelligent personal assistants, autonomous robots, intelligent global industrial systems, and other self-learning devices, systems, or applications. Gartner predicts that this trend is the most “breakthrough” in the top ten key technologies of 2014, as it is in the “smart machines” that many engineering and scientific areas of information technology are combined, and also that this trend will have a long-term development, and by 2020 year, we can all see, finally, the massive universal introduction of "smart machines".

10. 3D printing

According to Gartner, global shipments of 3D printers will grow by 75% in 2014 and by 100% in 2015. Despite the fact that expensive factory versions of these devices have existed for 20 years, the mass distribution of 3D printers at a price of $ 500 Gartner foresees from 2014-2015 yy