How Facebook, Cloud, Mobility Are Changing Enterprise IT

How Facebook, Cloud, Mobility Are Changing Enterprise IT By Jeffrey Burt

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets, a trend driven by such technologies as cloud computing, virtualization and employees using their personal PCs on their corporate networks. The need for hardware ownership won’t go away, but some of it will shift to third parties.

By 2012, 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators will be India-centric IT companies, which are leveraging their positions to expand into other sectors, including in R&D projects in such areas as cloud computing.

By 2012, Facebook, through such features as Connect, will evolve into the hub of the interoperable social Web. Other social media companies, such as Twitter, will continue to grow, but it will be Facebook at the center of that universe.

By 2014, carbon remediation costs will become an important part of the IT decision-making process for businesses, just as the energy cost savings from such technologies as server virtualization and desktop power management are today.

By 2012, 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from a PC will have occurred before the user first turns the system on. Thanks to more environmentally aware users, cost and social pressures, and the influence of eco-centric organizations, IT vendors are becoming more focused on greenhouse gas emissions.

By 2015, the growing anger among PC users over the flood of spam and other “marketing clutter” will lead legislators to regulate Internet marketing.

By 2014, more than 3 billion people worldwide will be able to conduct banking and other transactions through mobile or Internet technology, as more emerging markets are seeing rapid growth in mobile and Internet technology while there continues to be advances in mobile payment, commerce and banking.

By 2015, context-enriched services will be to mobile consumers what search engines are to the Web, with the context provider—whether that’s Web, device, social platforms, telecom service providers, enterprise software vendors or communication infrastructure vendors—becoming the most powerful position in the context business model.

By 2013, mobile phones will replace PCs as the most common device in the world for accessing the Internet. By that year, there will be about 1.78 billion PCs in use; the number of browser-equipped mobile phones will be more than 1.82 billion units.