IT megatrends in 2015 and beyond

Fundamental changes are being seen in the economy and the way business is being done today.In this age of information, organizations have to rethink the very foundation of how they operate, and move towards making things faster and economically viable, rather than the old adage of building bigger and better.

Businesses have evolved from systems built for efficiency to systems built for innovation, with the most valuable tool today being information and the access to technology such as smart devices. Companies who have innovated and evolved on today’s technology have indisputably risen and becoming one of the world’s largest in its respective industry. For example, Uber, a taxi company, owns no cars, Facebook, a media platform, creates no content and Airbnb, a accommodation provider, owns no real estate.The common thread between these three examples is the empowerment of consumers through the use of applications (apps) across their smart devices.

Businesses today are undoubtedly under intense pressure to respond to the demand for consumer-like apps and experience.Companies, regardless of size, can no longer just rely on their assets.Businesses have to constantly reinvent themselves to stay ahead of the curve.

In my view, the following are the key technology trends that will take center stage in the next couple of years:

Digitization
In the past decade, IT has seen numerous evolutions. We have moved from grid to cloud, from service-oriented architecture to microservices, and from machine virtualization to container technology. However, another transition that has been quietly taking place. Existing technologies and intellectual assets are being increasingly exposed in software, in a trend industry analysts call digitization.

Digitization has been catalyzed by convergence, and the alignment of social, economic, and technology trends. Digitization of everything, from mobile solutions to privacy and security, will be a source for competitive differentiation by the organizations that get it right. Organizations have to embrace integration technologies, which allow companies combine their intellectual assets with web APIs in order to come up with effective products and solutions.

‘Containerized’IT
Containerization is the lightweight alternative to full machine virtualization that involves placing an application in a container with its own operating environment.In today's enterprise environment, containers have rapidly transformed IT and drawn tremendous interest because of its multifaceted benefits. Sixty-seven percent of respondents in a recent Red Hat-sponsored survey of global IT decision makers and professionals are planning production roll-outs of container-based applications over the next two years.

Organizations need an integrated infrastructure platform designed to run, orchestrate and scale multi-container-based applications and services.They also need a simplified creation and deployment process which will helpthem to consistently managetraditional and cloud-native applications.
Another exciting year of PaaS
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has had strong industry support for a few years now. However, 2015 could mark a fresh chapter in its history.Docker popularized the concept of containerization, and the world vetted the viability of a container-based architecture. Now, enterprises are moving from asking about containers as a roadmap item to asking for implementation details.Last year has shown that a growing number of enterprises are now choosing PaaS ahead of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as the cornerstone of their private/hybrid cloud strategy.

Organizations have cried out for a flexible platform for a microservices architecture, and PaaS and cloud vendors are starting to deliver. Open source containers and orchestration practices which change the developer experience and move the platform in the direction of what customers are asking for are now available. The growing trend of the Internet of Things (IoT) places even more pressure on PaaS vendors to provide services that are easy to manage, highly available, and massively scalable.

Shifting gears for mobility
Enterprises are capitalizing on the increasing trend of the consumerization of IT and proliferation of mobile devices, as they aim to develop applications to improve employee productivity and customer satisfaction. A study found that 82 percent of organizations are planning to invest in mobile device management solutions creating policies around it, in 2015.

Mobility is a top priority for many businesses in order to drive innovation, streamline operational efficiency, and develop new business models. Organizations are looking for solutions that enable rapid development and integration of enterprise applications to help them move towards a mobile-first strategy.