| February 5, 2010
Hybrid model favoured for the cloud
Cloud computing, the most important trend for 2010 has barely even started, according to Ovum. The research company believes the next three years will see cloud computing mature rapidly as vendors and enterprises come to grips with the opportunities and challenges that it represents.
Some prefer to limit cloud computing to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), whilst others (Ovum included) also consider software-as-a-service (SaaS) and private clouds part of the phenomenon. A wider perspective helps understand one of the key trends in cloud computing -- cloud computing will be hybrid. "Enterprises will mix and match public and private cloud elements with traditional hosting and outsourcing services to create solutions that fit short and long-term requirements", said Laurent Lachal, an Ovum analyst.
"The past 18 months have seen a significant shift in focus away from public clouds towards private ones owing to a powerful mix of vendor push and user pull," Lachal said. The private cloud is, to a large extent, a rebadging of what data centre-focused hardware, software, and services vendors have been doing under different names (such as utility computing, autonomic IT, on-demand data centre, etc.) for the past 10 years. Many users are wary of public clouds' quality of service in areas such as reliability, availability, scalability, and security, but are curious about the possibility of adopting some of their characteristics (like on-demand instant provisioning of IT assets).
Private clouds are either defined as the aim of the data centre evolution (a long patient maturation process) or as shortcuts that push parts of the data centre ahead to deliver focused return on investment. What is needed is a way to reconcile the two approaches (private-cloud-as-a-journey and as-a-shortcut) to understand when, on the road towards a next generation data centre, users should take shortcuts. Unfortunately, most vendors currently emphasise the second approach rather than trying to reconcile the two.
"Cloud computing promises to tackle two irreconcilable (so far) IT challenges; the need to lower costs and boost innovation. It will take a lot of effort from enterprises to actually make it work. Instead of a nimbler IT with their IT mess for less somewhere else, the ill-prepared will end up with their IT mess spread across a wider area," said Lachal.
Mobile phone shipments rebound
The world's mobile phone market grew 11.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009, ending five consecutive quarters of decline, according to IDC. Vendors shipped 325.3 million units in the quarter compared to 292.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2008, IDC found. In addition, vendors shipped a total of 1.13 billion units on a cumulative worldwide basis in 2009, down 5.2 per cent from the 1.19 billion units shipped in 2008.
"The mobile phone market has rebounded in dramatic fashion," said Kevin Restivo, IDC analyst.
"The Asia/Pacific region and the United States were primarily responsible for pushing the market back into growth territory. Overall, vendors offered a wide array of converged mobile devices (smartphones) and messaging devices in the seasonally strong fourth quarter, to take advantage of increased user demand."
One area of the market that has consistently shown growth all year is the converged mobile device market. "Consumer tastes for mobile phones have increasingly shifted from simple voice telephony to greater data usage, and both handset vendors and carriers have been eager to meet demand despite ongoing economic challenges. IDC believes that the converged mobile device market grew almost 30 per cent year over year, and that the market will continue to gain momentum as device selection increases and price decreases continue into 2010 and beyond."
IDC anticipates that the worldwide mobile phone market will rebound in 2010. "In 2009, the mobile phone market, like many others, contracted due to economic pressures. But as the year progressed, demand for mobile phones increased each quarter while year-over-year declines progressively decreased," added Restivo. "Economic recovery mixed with pent-up demand will create positive conditions for handset vendors in both developed and emerging markets in 2010. Meanwhile, key handset vendors expect to exceed their 2009 shipment levels with refreshed portfolios, leveraging interest in touchscreens, messaging devices, and converged mobile devices."
In Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), 2009 was relatively flat year on year, marked by a stronger preference for low-cost handsets in China and India as users substituted away from more expensive options under recessionary pressure. However, the Asia/Pacific market saw strong gains in the fourth quarter, reflecting a strong start to recovery. Touchscreen-enabled devices remained a hot segment of the market, helping to drive the demand for converged mobile devices across the region
A business case for social software
A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for businesses. Success in social software and collaboration will be characterised by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business. Research company Gartner offers five key predictions for social software:
By 2014, social networking services will replace e‑mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 per cent of business users.
Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 per cent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.
"The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities," said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner.
By 2012, more than 50 per cent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but standalone enterprise microblogging will have less than five per cent penetration.
The huge popularity of the consumer-microblogging service Twitter, has led many organisations to look for an "enterprise Twitter" that provides microblogging functionality with more control and security features to support internal use between employees. Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do; to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions, and so on.
"However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a standalone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter's scale is one of the reasons for its popularity," said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner.
By 2013, more than 70 per cent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
When it comes to collaboration, IT organisations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web-conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. By 2014, IT organisations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in a failure rate of more than 70 per cent in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty per cent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 per cent of IT-driven initiatives.
Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets for designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high. A dearth of methods, technologies, and tools will impede the design and delivery of social media solutions in the near term. But long term, enterprises will realise that social media is not a "hit or miss" activity naturally prone to high failure rates, and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency.
Within five years, 70 per cent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modelled on user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
As we move toward three billion phones in the world serving the main purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime, anywhere, Gartner expects more end-users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only applications they use. The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use.
"IT organisations should continue to procure leading-edge smartphones for testing and to accumulate knowledge on how the collaboration applications on such devices accomplish business tasks," said Ken Dulaney, a vice president at Gartner.
"As more organisations consider replacing desk phones with cell phones, they may wish to anchor their collaboration tools also on the cell phone."
By the end of 2015, only 25 per cent of enterprises will routinely utilise social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.
Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among people and groups in an organisation, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses.
For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organisations.
|
