Research firm Gartner kicked off its annual Gartner Symposium and ITxp 2012 in Cape Town and as Gartner’s Rene Jacobs welcomed delegates, she emphasised the role of the CEO within a changing IT landscape.
Jacobs revealed that more CEOs prioritise growth over cost-cutting, while 75% of CEOs will explore opportunities with BRICS countries.
She also revealed that emerging markets have greater relevance for developed markets. “Emerging markets are sources of innovation, and take innovative approaches to affordable solutions,” she said.
“IT innovation has been one of the biggest drivers of economic growth over the last 30 years. The nexus of technology is as important in Africa as anywhere else in the world,” she continued.
Expanding further on the nexus of technology, Gartner’s Senior Vice President of Research Peter Sondergaard explained that the nexus consists of four key fundamentals, namely Mobile, Social, Information and Cloud. “The nexus is the next age of the computing,” he said.
The cloud will allow users to optimise their capabilities, and the question was asked if CIOs were ready for the change that is about to happen in industry. Sondergaard added that the second phase, Mobility, is about enabling employees to connect through pervasive action. This will include M-Commerce, location intelligence and mobile services robotics.
Exploring the social aspect of the nexus, he said that social computing will kick off the next phase that will allow for social collaboration on a new level and there will be mass employee involvement with enterprise.
As to the fourth aspect of the nexus of technology, Sondergaard simply said “Information is the oil of 21st century, and big data will change the way everything works.”
“Combine all the aspects (Social, Mobility, Information and Cloud) and you have the nexus, where mobile devices will become windows into the personal cloud, where tech will be over-shadowed by IT ecology,” he added.
Adding to that, Sondergaard said that by 2017, the Chief Marketing Officer may have a bigger IT budget than the CIO and an increase in the number of disruptive vendors such as Facebook, Amazon and Apple is expected. At the same time established vendors are currently struggling to survive as the industry moves towards the nexus.
“The increase in IT will change the way we work and the way we live. 90% of businesses will bypass broad deployment of Windows 8. The shift to mobile is almost overtaking companies that can’t change fast enough,” he continued.
Concluding his presentation, Sondergaard revealed that the Consumerisation of IT will result in a declining price point for the nexus, while the nexus changes the fundamentals of business models.
“By 2014 the install base of mobile devices will overtake the install base of PCs. The second generation of mobility will have innovative mobile-only capabilities. Almost 37% of CEOs want customer intelligence, and by 2015, big data demand will reach 1 million jobs in the Global 1000, but only a third of that will be filled. IT professionals are changing the world, and we need to employ destructive creation to drive IT forward,” he concluded.
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
