Analyst firm Gartner believes that it has identified eight
key trends - including the four Big Cs of consumerisation,
commoditisation, collaboration and community - that will create an
“unstoppable whirlwind of change” not only to IT and business, but
society as a whole.
“The next 30 years will see technology reaching every individual,
in every part of society and will in turn have a huge impact on the
way businesses operate,” says Steve Prentice, Gartner analyst and
chief of research.
Those companies laden down with legacy baggage will increasingly
face stiff competition from ‘green fielders’ with the agility to
pioneer new business models.
“The challenge to established companies comes not from other
established players, but from start-up entrepreneurs who will use
technology to upset the status quo,” says Prentice.
Underlying these changes is shift in the balance of power away from
big business and suppliers to consumers and customers.
The other key technology transformers include virtualisation and
tera-architectures, which will help create true real-time
enterprises. A shift towards buying software on a pay-as-you-use
model will also erode the dominance of software suppliers, with
hardware suppliers quickly following the same fate, Gartner
predicts.