The future of information technology (IT) will be dominated by data, with social platforms evolving as a new source of business intelligence, and cloud computing delivering on IT’s role as a driver of business growth, according to a new report from Accenture.
The Accenture Technology Vision 2011 report identifies eight emerging trends that challenge long-held assumptions about IT and are poised to reshape the business landscape.
The most important trend indentified in the report is platform architecture which will be selected to cope with increasing volumes of data and the complexity of data management.
The report finds the evolution of social media into social platforms, which means company web sites may no longer be the first port of call for customers, leading to change in the way companies conduct business.
Accenture research and development and alliances managing director Gavin Michael said the role of technology is changing and from a support role, it is now driving business performance and enriching people’s lives like never before.
"IT and business leaders will begin to view application services as utilities that can be procured off the shelf and the roles of application and data will be reversed, with data becoming the platform that supports application services," Michael said.
The third factor that would influence the IT is cloud computing, which will become so pervasive that the term itself becomes superfluous.
According to the report, hybrid clouds- software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) in combination with internal applications will cement IT’s role as a driver of business growth.
The other trends identified in the report are data security, data privacy, analytics, architecture and user experience.
