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Ten Critical Trends and Technologies

Impacting IT During the Next Five Years

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

October 21-25, 2012

Walt Disney World Dolphin

Orlando, FL

David Cappuccio

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This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use ofhe intended Gartner audience or other authorized recipients. This presentation may contain information that is confidential,proprietary or otherwise legally protected, and it may not be further copied, distributed or publicly displayed without theexpress written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.© 2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Ten Critical Trends and Technologies Impacting IT During the Next Five Years



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Key Issue: What predictions will shape CIO strategies in the Era of the Nexus?

New forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending. Specifically,

the forces of cloud computing, social media/networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a

rapid pace. These evolutions are largely happening despite the controls that IT normally places on the use of

technologies. The cloud offers new delivery styles and options that are industrialized in a value chain in which IT is

only one part of that delivery. Social computing allows collaboration and a shift of behavioral patterns of users and th

communities in which they work. Mobility offers new access channeled to applications and data and, at the same time

provides end users with a wide variety of choices of devices. Finally, the concept of big data begins to forever alter

the relationship of technology to information consumption, as data coming from multiple federated sources and inboth structured and unstructured forms must now be analyzed using new methodologies foreign to many IT

departments. And, as in last year's report, to top it all off, IT organizations must respond to all of these demands while

balancing security against access and continuing to meet the expectations of individuals who are more technology-

savvy than ever before. This transformation will not desist, and it demands that IT leaders reconsider and (potentially)

rebuild IT's capabilities. Our top predictions (see "Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2012 and

Beyond: Control Slips Away" and "Top Industry Predicts 2012: Industries Face Intensified Consumerization and

Technology Disruption") focus on how the shifting role of IT will affect economies, governments, businesses and

individuals.

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The personal device era of IT provides business users with increased levels of personal flexibility and

functionality, and complexity the traditional IT service desk is unable to support. Meeting the needs of the

business requires a level of IT process maturity few I&O organizations have. When the business cannot

wait and IT cannot effectively deliver and support IT services and the IT service desk cannot demonstrate

business value, the notion that IT is not agile enough to meet changing business needs and the value

proposition of the IT service desk is impaired. Despite the establishment of industry best practices over the

past 20 years, IT service desks still struggle to provide adequate IT support. An overview of operational

performance metrics over the last five years reinforces the notion that the IT service desk has failed

improve effectiveness and efficiency levels despite year over year increases in cost. The IT service desk

must look to new and innovative means of user engagement to address demand, or perish as costly,

ineffective, business irrelevant entities. The survival of the IT support organization rests on new IT service

desk analyst skill sets and techniques that leverage the same consumer-based forces that accelerate business

demand to their advantage.

See: IT Service Desks Must Modernize User Experiences or Get Out of The Way



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Business users expect the same level of IT performance and support as they experience with consumer-

based applications and services. Efforts to move toward customer-focused environments must include an

evaluation and evolution of the primary business touchpoint: the IT service desk analyst. Business-user

demand for customer satisfaction is far outstripping the IT support organizations supply. IT organizations

must invest in the development of IT service desk analyst skills and attributes, and organize appropriately

to increase IT's perceived value to the rest of the organization. IT leaders focused on improving customer

satisfaction must conceptualize strategies beyond simply providing "IT service with a smile." Business-user

satisfaction can be a moving target, but enabling higher levels of productivity at the IT service desk level

demonstrates that the IT organization cares about the business, and that it's committed to ensuring that users

meet their goals and objectives. While a focus on traditional training, procedures, security access,

knowledge management and scripts is warranted, a focus on next-generation support skills will be

paramount to meet the needs and expectations of the business more efficiently. This research outlines

current and future IT service desk skills and attributes for IT leaders to evaluate in determining Level 1

analyst roles and responsibilities with respect to current and future demand.

See: Evolve the Profile of Your IT Service Desk Analyst to Meet the Demands of the Business



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It's a means to abstract the network just as server virtualization abstracts the server. Transforms the network topology

from box/port at a time configuration to flow at a time – linked to application. Abstracts the network like a hypervisor

abstracts the server and it gives programmatic control

In SDN the controller has a view of the entire network topology both the virtual and physical components of it

including switches, firewalls, ADC, etc. and provides the abstracted view to provisioning and managing the network

connections and services that the applications and the operator requires. Unlike traditional networks where distributed

forwarding and routing protocols manage topology based upon port and route metrics that were developed to recover

the Arpanet from a Soviet Union Nuclear first strike, the SDN controller (pair) is optimized for control of a data cente(single, or hybrid cloud) and is the authoritative source for topology and policy enforcement. This is important that it

allows simplification of how the network is designed and operated – in that one is not boxed by configuring it to

individual vendor platforms and even different distributed network protocols. OpenFlow is a great example of that

generalized network tunneling protocol that provides a generic API that any network operator can use to create his

own control and management schemes based on the application requirements of his organization. And there will be

other OpenFlow type SDN protocols that are designed ground up from an application level logic than from the

traditional network paradigm of protocol, device and link-based thinking.



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With a modern processor SDN software can examine >1M new flows per second, can update the network

topology and program the physical and virtual switches to forward the traffic dynamically. Applications

will set policies and APIs that allow the controller to interface with data center wide provisioning and

management applications. This can reduce the time required to provision network resources for a new VM

from weeks to < 1 hour. With guaranteed consistent end to end policies across virtual and physical switches

Once programmatic control over the network is established applications can be built atop the controller. For

example, DPI of flows can trigger replication of flows to analysis or forensics engines or re-direction tohoney-pots to trap attackers.

When used along with encapsulations like OpenFlow SDN can be used to dynamically extend a private

cloud into a hybrid model to masking the enterprise specific IP addresses from the cloud provider's

infrastructure. SDN also promises to allow service providers to offer dynamic provisioned WAN services,

potentially across multi-provider/multi-vendor networks. Of course, there is the potential for significant

organizational disruption as traditional network skills begin to shift, and alignment with specific vendor

products or platforms becomes less rigid.



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A fact that data centers have lived with for many years remains true today: Data growth continues unabated

From an IT perspective, one of the main issues is not awareness of the issue, but prioritization of the issues.

We have spent so many years dealing with this, and surviving, that storage management projects are usually

initiated from the ground up, rather than top-down, relegating many of these to "skunkworks" status with

little long-term funding.

Leading-edge firms have realized the problem and are beginning to focus on storage utilization and

management as a means to reduce floor space usage and energy usage, improve compliance and BC/DRprograms, and improve controls on growth within the data center. Now is the time to do this, because most

of the growth during the next five years will be in unstructured data — the most difficult to manage from a

process or tool point of view.

Technologies that will become critical over the next few years are in-line deduplication, automated tiering

of data to get the most efficient usage patterns per kilowatt, and flash or SSD drives for higher-end

performance optimization, but with significantly reduced energy costs. NAND pricing continues to improve

at a rapid pace, moving from $7,870 per gigabyte in 1997 down to $1.25 per gigabyte today — and this

trend will continue.



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The hype surrounding cloud computing grew exponentially during 2011. Vendors increasingly use cloud computing

as a marketing label for many old technologies and offerings, devaluing the term and trend. Although cloud

computing is a natural evolution of various enterprise and Web-based technologies and trends, it is a mistake to

simply relabel these older technologies as "cloud computing." Cloud computing emerges from the synergistic

intersection of select elements of these trends and technologies. This new computing model drives revolutionary

changes in the way solutions are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. Cloud computing isn't defined by

one product or technology. It's a style of computing that characterizes a model whereby providers deliver varied IT-

enabled capabilities to consumers. The key characteristics of cloud computing are: (1) delivery of capabilities "as aservice," (2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, (3) using Internet [by extension, Web]

technologies/techniques to develop and deliver services, and (4) designing for delivery to external customers.

The final item warrants examination. Cloud computing services are designed based on an assumption that the service

provider will deliver capabilities to third parties that act as consumers. Cloud computing is heavily influenced by the

Internet and vendors that have sprung from it. Companies such as Google deliver various services built on a massively

parallel architecture that is highly automated, with reliability provided via software techniques, rather than highly

reliable hardware. Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits of cloud computing

are built-in elasticity and scalability, which reduce barriers and enable these firms to grow quickly. A hybrid cloud

service is composed of services that combine either for increased capability beyond what any one of them have


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(aggregating services, customizing them, or integrating two together), or for additional capacity.



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There is an emerging trend in hybrid data centers whereby growth is looked at from the perspective of

applications criticality and locality. As an example, if a data center is nearing capacity, rather than begin the

project to define and build another site, workloads are assessed based on criticality to the business, risk of

loss, easy of migration, and a determination is made to move some workloads either to co-location

facilities, hosting, or even to a cloud type service. This frees up floor space in the existing site for future

growth, both solving the scale problem, and deferring capital spend for potentially years. An alternative to

this is for older data centers to begin migrating critical work off-site, thus reducing downtime risks and

business interruptions, while freeing up the old data center for additional work (non-critical), or for a slow,

in-place, retrofit project.





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In the PC world of the last quarter century, both the operating system and application were primarily

resident on the desktop (some large and complex applications such as ERP were located on servers that

could be remote from clients). Today, anything goes! The operating system – as well as the application –

can be executed on the PC or a server – or streamed to a PC when needed. Choice of architecture is

dependent on user needs and the time frame for implementation. No longer does one size fit all.

The new choices have enormous implications for networking – both in terms of bandwidth and latency. So

too does the type of client: thin or fat.Regarding Windows 8 deployments, 90% of enterprises will bypass broad scale deployment, and will focus

on optimized windows 8 deployments on specific platforms (e.g., mobile, tablet) only.



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Servers have been undergoing a long-term evolutionary process. They have moved from stand-alone

pedestals to rack-mounted form factors in a rack cabinet. The latest step in x86 server hardware evolution is

the blade server. It has taken hardware from just single servers with internal peripherals in a rack cabinet to

a number of more dense servers in a single chassis with shared back plane, cooling and power resources. A

true component design allows for the independent addition of even more granular pieces like processors,

memory, storage, and I/O elements. As blades have grown, so has the marketing push from server providers

to position blades as the next most advanced technical step in server evolution and even, in some cases, as

the ultimate server solution. It always take a closer examination of multiple factors —

required density,

power/cooling efficiency requirement, high availability, workload etc — to reveal where blades, rack and

skinless really do have advantages. Moving forward this evolution will split into multiple directions as

appliance use increases and specialty servers begin to emerge (e.g., analytics platforms).



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A wide range of wireless technologies are maturing, offering a variety of compromises on the range vs.

power vs. bandwidth, allowing the development of hybrid networks. Near-field communications (NFC) is a

magnetic communications interface. Instead of a propagating electromagnetic wave, it uses a magnetic field

to transfer data. NFC is widely deployed in contact-less smart cards, where its short range and simple

electronics are an asset. Ultrawideband radio uses a variety of techniques to create a signal occupying an

enormous bandwidth. Standards under consideration occupy 500MHz to 1.9GHz, 20 to 80 times greater

than the widest-band technologies in use today. This causes UWB to have a very short range — 10 to 20

meters —

but allows it to carry vast amounts of data. ZigBee and Bluetooth are also suitable inter-node

communication technologies. WiMAX is a wide-area networking system, offering 70Mbps channels in a

fixed antenna environment across a metropolitan area.

"Mesh network" is a broad term describing wireless networks in which each node can relay signals via

several other nodes. The network finds routes dynamically, depending on the availability of nodes. Mesh

networks are in their infancy, but bring benefits to applications where power, bandwidth and mobility

challenge a conventional approach. Mesh network nodes run a compact operating system designed for

simplicity and dynamic reconfiguration. The most established example is TinyOS — a component-based,


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event-driven open source operating system designed for wireless sensor networks.



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The Internet of Things is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer

devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. The vision and concept have existed for years; however,

there has been an acceleration in the number and types of things that are being connected and in the technologies for

identifying, sensing and communicating. Key advances include:

Embedded sensors: Sensors that detect and communicate changes (e.g., accelerometers, GPS, compasses, cameras)

are being embedded not just in mobile devices but in an increasing number of places and objects.

The ongoing connectivity with a device or item and interpretation of the resultant data stream provide a myriad ofopportunities to convert a one-off product sale into an ongoing service, with associated revenue and upsell/cross-sell

opportunities.

Image recognition: Image recognition technologies strive to identify objects, people, buildings, places, logos and

anything else that has value to consumers and enterprises. Smartphones and tablets equipped with cameras have

pushed this technology from mainly industrial applications to broad consumer and enterprise applications.

NFC payment: NFC allows users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader.

Once NFC is embedded in a critical mass of phones for payment, industries such as public transportation, airlines,

retail and healthcare can explore other areas in which NFC technology can improve efficiency and customer service.



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The appliance term has been cycling through the IT infrastructure market many times since the inception of

servers. Organizations are generally attracted to appliances when they offer hands-off solutions to

application and functional requirements, but organizations are also repelled by appliances when they

require additional investments (time or software) for management functions. Thus, successful appliance

products must not only provide a cost-effective application solution, they must require minimum

management overhead. Despite the historical mixed bag of successes and failures, vendors continue to

introduce appliances to the market because the appliance model represents a unique opportunity for a

vendor to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale. In short, appliances

aren't going away any time soon. But what's new in appliances is the introduction of virtual appliances. A

virtual appliance enables a server vendor to offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but

without the need to provide any actual hardware. We see virtual appliances gaining popularity and fully

expect to see a broad array of virtual appliance offerings emerge during the next five years. However, the

growth in virtual appliances will not kill physical appliances; issues such as physical security, specialized

hardware requirements and ecosystem relations will continue to drive physical requirements.



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Virtual appliances also offer broad variations of implementation scope. The main thrust today revolves

around IaaS/SaaS solutions, that will usually run on some sort of general purpose server infrastructure. An

emerging opportunity for virtual appliances will enable Isvs to package their products (potentially with

"just enough operating system," and sell the complete solution (potentially as a download) designed to run

as a VM. In general, virtual appliances are more likely to leverage existing investments, while physical

appliances demand a conscious decision between dedicated purpose hardware and the use of general

purpose servers. The very use of the appliance terminology creates great angst for some vendors and users

— particularly for physical appliances. Strictly speaking, a highly integrated platform like Oracle's Exadata

or VCE Vblock is not a true appliance; these are factory integrated systems that will require some degree of

configuration and tuning, even when the software stack is integrated; they will never fit the classic notion

of a "pizza box." But while such systems will not be consumed as appliances, they are certainly packaged

and sold in a very appliance-like manner. Many other physical appliances will be more faithful to the

concept — they will be plug & play devices that can only deliver a very prescribed set of services.



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The sources of complexity within IT are easy to spot. They include the number of initialization parameters

for input into starting an Oracle database and the number of pages of manuals to use a Cisco switch. The

complexity increases, though, when we look at combining several elements such as, in this case, Microsoft

Exchange running on VMware. What makes this complexity worse, however, is the fact that we are not

getting our money's worth: Historical studies suggest that IT organizations actually use only roughly 20%

of the features and functions in a system. At the end of the day, this results in large amounts of IT debt,

whose high maintenance costs for "leaving the lights on" divert needed funds from projects that can

enhance business competitiveness.



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As we enter the third phase of virtualization (phase 1: MF/Unix, phase 2: basic x86) we see that the higher

the proportion of virtualized instances, the greater the workload mobility across distributed and connected

network nodes, validating fabric and cloud computing as viable architectures. As more of the infrastructure

becomes virtualized, as shown in the graphic, we are reshaping IT infrastructure. We will see more of the

possibilities in the future where the "fabric" will eventually have the intelligence to analyze its own

properties against policy rules that create optimum paths, change them to match changing conditions and do

so without requiring laborious parameter adjustments. X86 virtualization is effectively the most important

technology innovation behind the modernization of the data center. With it will be a sea-change in how we

view the roles of compute, network and storage elements – from physical hardwired to logical and

decoupled applications. The 6 bullet points in the slide are the prominent forces that address questions of

the decline of Unix and other proprietary OS's even though Unix in most of its properties is still superior to

Linux or Windows.

Eventually IT becomes one logical system.



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The explosion of social media, virtualization and the dramatic increases in data center complexity have

highlighted a significant issue within IT organizations today. First, a large percentage of baby boomers are

getting near to retirement age, and those same people often hold a significant amount of corporate

knowledge — the kind that is rarely transferred via training, but via experience. Secondly most IT

departments are organized vertically based on skill set (e.g., server team, storage team, etc.), but in a highly

virtualized environment, the identification of problems is rarely done vertically, but horizontally. An

applications performance problem could be an application issue, server performance issue, network

bandwidth problem, storage problem or even a virtualization parameter issue. Solutions often include

members from multiple teams (SWAT teams) and can be very difficult to identify and replicate. Aggressive

IT shops are now looking to create horizontal teams, or at least motivate staff to go beyond their vertical

expertise and begin broadening their skills sets and their overall value to the company (vs. just to IT).



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With the increased awareness of the environmental impact data centers can have, there has been a flurry of activity

around the need for a data center efficiency metric. Most that have been proposed, including power usage

effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE), attempt to map a direct relationship between

total facility power delivered and IT equipment power available. Although these metrics will provide a high-level

benchmark for comparison purposes between data centers, what they do not provide is any criteria to show

incremental improvements in efficiency over time. They do not allow for monitoring the effective use of the power

supplied — just the differences between power supplied and power consumed. For example, a data center might be

rated with a PUE of 2.0, an average rating, but if that data center manager decided to begin using virtualization toincrease his or her average server utilization from 10% to 60%, while the data center itself would become more

efficient using existing resources, then the overall PUE would not change at all. A more effective way to look at

energy consumption is to analyze the effective use of power by existing IT equipment, relative to the performance of

that equipment. While this may sound intuitively obvious (who wouldn't want more-efficient IT?), a typical x86 serve

will consume between 60% and 70% of its total power load when running at very low utilization levels. Raising

utilization levels has only a nominal impact on power consumed, and yet a significant impact on effective

performance per kilowatt. Pushing IT resources toward higher effective performance per kilowatt can have a twofold

effect of improving energy consumption (putting energy to work) and extending the life of existing assets through

increased throughput. The PPE metric is designed to capture this effect.



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