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

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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 1

Ten Critical Trends and Technologies Impacting IT During the Next Five Years
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 the
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 in
both 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 technologysavvy 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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 2

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 3

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

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

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

Business users expect the same level of IT performance and support as they experience with consumerbased 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
This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

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

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 center
(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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

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

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 to
honey-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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 7

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 8

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

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/DR
programs, 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.
This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 9

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

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 ITenabled capabilities to consumers. The key characteristics of cloud computing are: (1) delivery of capabilities "as a
service," (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
This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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

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Page #

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

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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the intended Gartner audience or other authorized recipients. This presentation may contain information that is confidential,
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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).

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 14

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the intended Gartner audience or other authorized recipients. This presentation may contain information that is confidential,
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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,
This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Page #

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

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 of
opportunities 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.
This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

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

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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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David Cappuccio
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Ten Critical Trends and Technologies Impacting IT During the Next Five Years

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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
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2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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

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.

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 23

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

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).

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 24

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 25

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

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 to
increase 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 server
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.
This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 26

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 27

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 28

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 29

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

This presentation, including any supporting materials, is owned by Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole use of
the 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 the
express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

David Cappuccio
SYM22_180, 10/12

Page 30