End-user analytics firm Nexthink shared with us its top five predictions for the year to come:
1. IT outsourcing service providers face pressure and must turn to predictive solutions that improve and not just maintain IT.
By 2014, Gartner predicts market consolidation will displace up to 20% of the top 100 IT service providers. A nexus of forces, including cloud, Big Data, mobility and social media, along with continued global economic uncertainty, will accelerate the restructuring of the nearly $1 trillion IT services market.
By 2015, low-cost cloud services will cannibalise up to 15% of top outsourcing players' revenue, and more than 20% of large IT outsourcers not investing enough in industrialisation and value-added services will disappear through merger and acquisition.
This will limit and endanger the typical offshore/nearshore approach run by dedicated IT services providers and create low-cost options onshore or facilitate a globalised approach to staffing.
CIOs should re-evaluate the providers and types of providers used for IT services, with particular interest in cloud-enabled providers supporting information, mobile and social strategies.
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2. IT Governance will become more important as, globally, pressure is applied from the highest levels of corporate and government organisations to implement controls that address governance, risk, and compliance requirements.
IT departments are increasingly responsible for defending against complex threats coming from inside as well as outside of the organisation. Add industry and regulatory compliance concerns in to the mix, and the future seems daunting.
3. VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) will continue to be a hot topic.
Although many IT organisations would love to go back to desktops/laptops, they’re finding that they still have to manage the image and all of the VDI server components, such as storage, which is expensive to do.
The industry will also continue to see the virtualisation of processing power, allowing mobile devices to access supercomputer capabilities and apply it to processes such as purchasing and logistics, to name a few.
> See also: 8 cyber security predictions for 2014
4. ITOA (IT operations analytics), recently identified by Gartner as a new emerging segment, will continue to take shape.
The satisfaction gap between end-users and IT departments is growing. IT maturity is lacking, and IT departments need to adopt analytics to improve IT operations, and spend more time on innovation instead of maintenance.
IT departments are realising that analytics can help them make better decisions than with gut instinct.
5. Agile Development has been very popular although it may not be applicable to those organisations without the focus and resources required to make it a success.
A greater number of companies are expected to turn to agile-ish development, which is still iterative and collaborative but requires less ongoing support from the client.
