Top Business Predictions for 2010

Gartner announced yesterday its key Business Predictions for 2010 that will probably change the business we do today – The 2010 Business predictions span 56 markets, topics and industry areas and more than 250 predictions in total.

Here is a run-down on some of the key business predictions made by Gartner:

• By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets

  Several Inter-related trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.
  The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.
  For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or deskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.

My Comment: This probably will be the biggest thing in coming years. I am sure you have already read about Microsoft-HP have jointly announced that they would be investing $250 million on Cloud computing. We will see majority of online companies venturing into Cloud one way or the another .

• By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market

  Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options (also known as cloud services).

• By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

  Through Facebook Connect and other similar mechanisms, Facebook will support and take a leading role in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web. As Facebook continues to grow and outnumber other social networks, this interoperability will become critical to the success and survival of other social networks, communication channels and media sites.
  Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop, seeking further adoption and specializations with communication or content areas, but Facebook will represent a common denominator for all of them.

• In 2012, 60 percent of a new PC’s total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on!

  Over the course of its entire lifetime, a typical PC consumes 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels, but around 80 percent of a PC’s total energy usage still happens during production and transportation.

Some of the other key predictions are:

• By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology

• By 2014, there will be a 90 percent mobile penetration rate and 6.5 billion mobile connections

• By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web

• By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

We will see lot of changes in the way we conduct business over the next 2-3 years and the 2 key things that will be forefront will Cloud Computing and Mobile Computing (via smart phones, tablets, handheld devices). You will be hearing lot of them in coming 2 years. Brace yourself for next gen of computing !

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