The 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report centered on plans over the next 24 months with business analytics, mobile, cloud and social business. Through IBM’s IT community and training site, developerWorks, more than 4,000 IT professionals across 25 industries contributed opinions for the survey, with the largest number of responses coming from the U.S., Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Business analytics carried the highest adoption tendency (90 percent) compared with other technology areas, and half of those not currently using an analytics plan expected to do so over the next 24 months, according to the report. Forty-two percent of respondents noted that business analytics is a focus area for software development, and, in another question, 87 percent of IT professionals stated open source platforms like Apache Hadoop and Linux are integral in that development.
For all of the hype surrounding cloud computing, 40 percent of IT professionals in the survey said their organization is not presently engaged in the cloud. However, over the next 24 months, 75 percent of all respondents believe their organizations will start to build cloud infrastructure, surpassing plans and investment in areas of virtualization and storage, according to the survey. In a survey question that allowed multiple selections, plans for cloud implementation were led by the following: develop new applications for the cloud (25 percent); virtualization (24 percent); storage (24 percent); private cloud (22 percent); extend existing applications to the cloud (21 percent); and hosted applications (20 percent).
There was crossover from the cloud into another area explored in the survey, mobile computing, as 51 percent of respondents cited adoption of the cloud was part of their mobile strategy. Overall, 85 percent of respondents are or expect to work via mobile capabilities within the next 24 months, with enterprise apps and industry-specific apps as the top two adoption areas with mobile technology, the survey stated.
The embrace of social business functionality comes with reservations, as 48 percent of respondents cited “adoption by employee and/or customer” as a point of business-side concern. Social business adoption is also regional, as India leads the way with 57 percent use of internal or external social interfaces, or even mass market social networks, followed by the U.S. (45 percent), China (44 percent) and Russia (19 percent).
Jim Corgel, general manager ISV and developer relations at IBM, said in a news release that the survey results show four business technology avenues that have “gone beyond niche status and are now part of any modern organization’s core IT focus.”
To access a copy of this report, click here.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
