Gartner: Personal Cloud Will Replace The Personal Computer By 2014

March 14th, 2012 | by Anil |

The personal computer has long been the essential tool of corporate employees, keeping all the secrets and spreadsheets of a business across a network of machines. But now, as the cloud technology trending recently, according to Gartner, Inc. the reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users digital lives.

Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users. Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices, said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner. Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life. Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isnt really about being after the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives, Mr. Kleynhans said.

The Next Paradigm Shift: Personal Cloud Computing Several driving forces are combining to create this new era. These mega trends have roots that extend back through the past decade but are aligning in a new way. Megatrend No. 1: Consumerization You Aint Seen Nothing Yet Gartner has discussed the consumerization of IT for the better part of a decade, and has seen the impact of it across various aspects of the corporate IT world. However, much of this has simply been a precursor to the major wave that is starting to take hold across all aspects of information technology as several key factors come together:

Users are more technologically-savvy and have very different expectations of technology. The internet and social media have empowered and emboldened users. The rise of powerful, affordable mobile devices changes the equation for users. Users have become innovators. Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have similar technology available to them.

Megatrend No. 2: Virtualization Changing How the Game Is Played Virtualization has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can implement client environments. Megatrend No. 3: App-ification From Applications to Apps When the way that applications are designed, delivered and consumed by users changes, it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market. Megatrend No. 4: The Ever-Available Self-Service Cloud The advent of the cloud for servicing individual users opens a whole new level of opportunity. Every user can now have a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do. Megatrend No. 5: The Mobility Shift Wherever and Whenever You Want Today, mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices. The combination of these mega trends, coupled with advances in new enabling technologies, is ushering in the era of the personal cloud, said Mr. Kleynhans. In this new world, the specifics of devices will become less important for the organization to worry about. Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, but no one device will be the primary hub. Rather, the personal cloud will take on that role. Access to the cloud and the content stored or shared in the cloud will be managed and secured, rather than solely focusing on the device itself.

Top 10 Key Information Technology Trends For 2012

October 31st, 2011 | by Anil |

At the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo, David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with Gartner, said the Top 10 Trends show how IT is changing in that many of them in the past been outside the traditional purview of IT, but they will all affect how IT does its job in the future. The Top 10 Trends and their impact, briefly include: 1 The evolution of virtualization: Cappuccio says virtualization will ultimately drive more companies to treat IT like a business. The danger during the next few years will be in following a specific vendors vision, though it is unlikely that any one vendors vision will

prevail. Users should have their own visions of architecture control, and build toward it with a constantly updated strategic plan. 2 Big data, patterns and analytics: Unstructured data will grow some 80% over the course of the next five years, creating a huge IT challenge. Technologies such as in-line deduplication, automated tiering of data to get the most efficient usage patterns per kilowatt, and flash or solid-state drives for higher-end performance optimization, will increase in importance over the next few years, Cappuccio said. Analytics and other systems to monitor for recurring data patterns that could develop into money making applications will also be important. 3. Energy efficiency and monitoring: The power issue has moved up the food corporate food chain, Cappuccio said. Nascent tools are beginning to roll out that can use analytic tools to watch power usage on a variety of levels. With the increased attention given to power consumption, it has become apparent that many systems are highly underutilized. At low utilization levels, they use a high percentage of their total energy draw. An average x86 server that is turned on, but idle, will draw upward of 65% of its nameplate wattage, for example. IT organizations need a clear inventory of what compute resources are doing and what workloads there is the potential for significant waste of energy. 4. Context aware apps: The big question here how to do something smart to take advantage of smartphones. Gartner has in the past said context-based computing will go beyond the business intelligence applications and truly make a unified communications environment possible by bringing together data culled from social networks and mobile-devices. 5. Staff retention and retraining: Here the idea is developing a plan to get people excited about their jobs enough to stay. And well need is as starting in 2011 an average of 10,000 baby boomers will be eligible to retire every day for the next 19 years, Cappuccio said. Loyalty to one company is not a quality found in new workers. 6. Social networks: Affordable and accessible technology has let individuals and communities come together in a new way with a collective voice to make statements about our organizations, the products/services we deliver and how we deliver them, Cappuccio said. The collective is made up of individuals, groups, communities, mobs, markets and firms that shape the direction of society and business. The collective is not new, but technology has made it more powerful -and enabled change to happen more rapidly Cappuccio said. The collective is just beginning to have an impact on business operations and strategies but most organizations do not have a plan for enabling or embracing it. Ignoring social networking is not an option, Cappuccio said. 7. Consumerization: The key trend here is the fact that new application types will be developed to address mobile users but they wont be desktop replacement applications. Still, a secure, well-defined strategy needs to be put into place to take advantage of this development, Cappuccio said. 8. Compute per square foot: Virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers. If used wisely, average server performance can move from todays paltry 7% to 12% average to 40% to 50%, yielding huge benefits in floor space and energy savings. Two issues that need to be considered going forward are the number of cores per server four- and eight-core systems are becoming

common, and 16 cores will be common within two years and overall data center energy trends. IT will also have to address things like performance/licensing, Cappuccio said 9. Cloud computing: While cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits of cloud computing are built-in elasticity and scalability. As certain IT functions industrialize and become less customized, such as email, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing, according to Cappuccio. 10. Fabrics: Gartner defines this infrastructure convergence as: The vertical integration of server, storage, and network systems and components with element-level management software that lays the foundation to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and dynamically. Systems put forth so far by Cisco and HP will unify network control but are not there yet.