Monday, December 31, 2012
Five IT Predictions for 2013
Many industry pundits and thought leaders use the changing of the new year as a reason to make bold predictions. Guess I am no different...
So, here are my top five IT predictions for 2013:
| | View blog reactionsSo, here are my top five IT predictions for 2013:
- Developers will become more important but less empowered: Long gone are the days where developers were respected and treated as equal members of the project team. Nowadays, they are subservient to project managers, architects and even the cafeteria workers and cleaning staff in most corporations. Many CIOs are starting to acknowledge that outsourcing to India got them rate arbitrage but little else and therefore are bring work back onshore. As the US developer ranks get rebuilt, they will go through many pains to become first-class IT citizens.
- CIOs will be forced to spend millions on remediating the plethora of insecure mobile applications. In many respects, mobile applications are actually less secure than their web counterparts. Communities such as the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) are busy understanding all of the nuanced ways that mobile applications can be compromised. This is being done without any press from analyst firms such as Gartner or Forrester. Smart CIOs will start having conversations with even smarter Chief Security Architects whom are either on their payroll or work for firms such as HP, Security Innovation, Cigital or other firms and start to acknowledge that if you install an enterprise application on a device that is controlled by someone else, that the attacker has an unlimited amount of time to decompile it and study.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is dead. The new conversation will focus on PaaS. The average corporate CIO is being encouraged to think about their business first, then applications then infrastructure; in that order, yet much of the cloud hype is bass akwards. Once the hype disappears, the media will finally come to their senses and start publishing articles of interest that are more business-aligned.
- Industry Analysts will still treat non-commercial open source as a step-child. Many understand that the Internet would not exist if it were not for non-commercial open source, whether it is Mozilla for browsers, Apache for Web Servers, Bind for DNS, etc. Increasingly, enterprises will start to care less about what vendor a particular piece of software comes from if any and instead focus on whether a piece of software meets their ultimate requirements. Customers sometimes don't care if it is vendor-backed or not, yet analyst firms will continue to play various misdirection tricks to hide the fact that there is no pay-for-play to be had.
- Big Data will Flame Out and be replaced with a focus on Small Data. If you sell database software and related hardware right now, you are more than likely rolling in the money. Sooner or later, the fad of information architecture will catch up to the point where it needs to demonstrate real return on investment. Many firms are growing their usage of big data techniques but few have generated massive ROI. The focus will shift away from the insatiable need for more data towards focusing on architecture styles that keep data as small as possible.
