10 Emerging IT Trends From Gartner Symposium
Here's a look at the top 10 emerging IT trends from the Gartner Symposium 2015, and what they mean for your IT operation.
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On Monday morning, David J. Cappuccio, vice president, distinguished analyst, and chief of research for the infrastructure teams with Gartner, strode on stage at the Gartner Symposium ITExpo 2015 in Orlando to talk about the top 10 emerging trends and what they mean for your IT operation. On one hand, this is the sort of talk that you expect from gatherings like this. On the other, this year saw several trends emerge that may indeed have a significant impact on your organization.
As is the case with all such lists, Cappuccio had a few that will almost certainly hit you squarely in the "Well, duh!" reflex point. There are others that will seem somewhat obvious after you've thought about them for a few minutes. (He's obviously thought about them for quite a lot of minutes.) If you're like me, one or two will be truly new ideas. It's the items in those last two categories that tend to make the whole exercise worthwhile.
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Cappuccio broke his list down into three categories: demand, technologies, and organization. The technologies category gets four trends, while the other two categories get three each. I'll keep them in the order they were presented, because there's no advantage to mixing them up. I will try to be very clear about which comments are his and which are mine.
One trend at the top of a lot of discussion lists at the Symposium was algorithms. Specifically, how those algorithms would be used to automate processes and procedures so they could be accomplished faster, more accurately, and generally better than if humans had a hand in them. The idea of automation will crop up as part of some of the trends discussed here. Do you think it should have been given its own spot on the list?
As always, I'm eager to know what you think about the list. Is it too obvious? Too esoteric? Just plain wrong? Let me know -- and I'll try to let you know what I heard in the halls and around the lunch tables at this giant gathering of IT industry executives.
IT infrastructure has grown in speed and capacity by leaps and bounds during the last decade. The growth slope doesn't show any sign of becoming flatter in the coming years. All this growth is in response to demand, which is, if anything, growing even faster than capacity.
This has a number of implications beyond the simple capex/opex equation. The impact on environmental factors (power and HVAC) is obvious, but there are also significant hits on things like maintenance windows. I spoke to several executives at the conference who said that maintenance windows have slammed shut: The only option is to use load balancing to fail over to an HA mirror while the primary is being updated, then update the HA twin after switch-back. That means twice the hardware and software licenses just to keep the bits flowing around the clock.
The whole notion of "shadow IT" is so last decade. In the modern enterprise, business unit managers and non-IT executives are assumed to be equal partners in leading the charge to new technology. In a number-filled slide, Cappuccio showed the results of a poll of CEOs -- a poll that indicated CMOs, CFOs, and business unit heads pretty much share the runner-up spot in the "Who's responsible for leading digital change?" sweepstakes.
It's important to note that this doesn't let CIOs off the hook. Rather, it puts additional pressure on the CIO to work with the other executives so their digital leadership doesn't result in digital disaster in the form of blown estimates for bandwidth, storage, and CPU usage. For CIOs, that means adding partnership and influence to the traditional strengths of leadership and control in order to protect the overall IT health of the organization.
For the last decade the enterprise IT mantra has been "cloud, cloud, cloud." In the third big trend, we recognize that all this cloudy goodness doesn't mean much until the data goes in and out to be used by people and processes. In that use, edge devices come into play.
The trend in edge devices, of course, has nothing to do with the traditional desktop computer or even the common laptop. Instead, edge devices are increasingly mobile, part of the Internet of Things, or both. The pieces of that fact that matter most to enterprise IT are these: You probably don't control the edge device; edge devices may well need to communicate with one another, without coming through the enterprise core; and no matter who controls the edge device and how it communicates, you are responsible for the user experience.
To generations of IT professionals the data center was a place -- a rather cold, noisy, and very special place. It's going too far to say that the trend is toward a data center that's a state of mind rather than an address, but it's only going a bit too far -- it's not heading off in the wrong direction.
The trend is for "data center" to describe a package of services and processes delivered to the enterprise. The data center thus joins servers, storage, and networks as a bundle that can be dynamically defined and redefined according to the needs of the enterprise. It's a new way of thinking about the glass house, but a real step toward an agile infrastructure for the future.
The "fully integrated stack" versus "best of breed" argument has been going on for decades. When hardware racks that are sitting in your closets (or in the data center) have to compete with cloud services, the pendulum swings toward the integrated stack for deployment speed and simplicity.
Enterprise hardware vendors are offering integrated systems, or converged systems, that bring processor, storage, and networking subsystems together in a single pre-configured rack. While some enterprises use these systems as part of data center build-out, the biggest impact of these integrated systems has, so far, been in remote and branch offices, where mini data centers can be purchased and deployed very quickly. Between integrated systems and cloud services, hardware deployment times are trending down -- and that's a good thing for enterprises and their CIOs.
Open source software is good for many enterprise purposes. That's been established. Using open source software, enterprise developers can pick and choose among functions and features to build software packages that perfectly fit the needs of the organization -- and they can do it within a budget that fits the needs of the finance department. Translating that same capability to the physical platform on which the software runs is why open source hardware makes the trend list.
In fairness, I believe that open source hardware is a future trend that's well underway. Intel and HP are among the companies that have showed prototypes of open source hardware. In these systems, customers would be able to pick and choose from hardware components from multiple sources that make use of common, standardized interconnections. Think of what you can do at the system level today brought down to the chip level. It's a compelling vision for companies that want to take advantage of hardware that's absolutely perfect for their situation and are willing to develop the human resources to design that perfect solution.
When things go well and truly wrong, your business needs to remain alive. That's the basic premise behind disaster recovery and business continuity, and that's the basis of a trend Cappuccio calls out for combining business continuity and IT service delivery. It turns out that there are several factors common to both, and there's nothing that fuels a trend like being able to write one check for two separate outcomes.
When you build a content delivery system (or a high-availability application platform), you're likely to build multiple sites in separate geographies. As it turns out, optimizing for one of these outcomes works to enable the other, so there's no good reason not to invest. Companies have begun noticing all this. They are building architectures that keep systems running (and running more effectively), and are thereby contributing to a trend that has relatively little downside for the enterprise.
Managing a single complex data center is difficult. Managing multiple data centers (along with multiple cloud services) across many time zones or national borders can be impossible until automation enters the picture. The automation -- the application of algorithms to enterprise IT operational data -- is what makes global data center management a trend.
Cappuccio drew a line through the various levels of operational data analysis, from descriptive through diagnostic, predictive, and on to prescriptive. He pointed out that it is a relatively small conceptual jump from prescriptive analytics to management automation. Faster, more reliable response to issues before they have an impact on operations? Fears about automation are rapidly being replaced by reliance on automation's consistency and speed. This is one trend that shows signs of accelerating as more and more companies see the benefits.
There was a lot of talk about "bimodal" at Gartner, but Cappuccio had a very specific meaning in mind when he added it to his trend list. For him, the two modes are focused on continuing operations and future needs. One values reliability and consistency above all; the other stretches limits and dances outside the lines in the search for new options that can improve results for departments or the enterprise as a whole.
If the organization is to succeed over the long term, the two sides of the IT equation must be in balance. Companies that look only at daily operations will find themselves behind their competitors when new systems are deployed, and those that are only chasing the future can suffer the wreckage of unreliable systems. Why is this seemingly obvious situation a trend? Because companies are recognizing the two modes in formal ways and building centers of responsibility and accountability around present and future operations. Bimodal is building. Expect to hear this term in many more industry conversations during the coming months.
What is really going on in enterprise IT at your company? If you're like many CIOs, you would admit that an honest answer would contain a high degree of uncertainty. Embracing business unit managers as IT partners means accepting the loss of control, to be replaced by influence and leadership.
In order to make the best of that control, IT management has to know what's really happening in IT. Who owns the workloads that are growing, the data flows that are taxing the network, and the data sets that threaten to overwhelm storage? Just because enterprise IT doesn't directly own every IT project, doesn't mean it shouldn't know what's going on. Workload monitoring may be the only chance for sanity left in the world of multiple-ownership enterprise computing.
Those are Gartner's 10 trends. Do you think they got them right? Do they reflect what you're seeing in your organization? Are there trends they left out? Let us know. I think that a great conversation about the list could be trending rapidly. See you in the comments.
What is really going on in enterprise IT at your company? If you're like many CIOs, you would admit that an honest answer would contain a high degree of uncertainty. Embracing business unit managers as IT partners means accepting the loss of control, to be replaced by influence and leadership.
In order to make the best of that control, IT management has to know what's really happening in IT. Who owns the workloads that are growing, the data flows that are taxing the network, and the data sets that threaten to overwhelm storage? Just because enterprise IT doesn't directly own every IT project, doesn't mean it shouldn't know what's going on. Workload monitoring may be the only chance for sanity left in the world of multiple-ownership enterprise computing.
Those are Gartner's 10 trends. Do you think they got them right? Do they reflect what you're seeing in your organization? Are there trends they left out? Let us know. I think that a great conversation about the list could be trending rapidly. See you in the comments.
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