The future for IT – apps in the cloud?

IBA GroupMark HillaryTechnology is continuously evolving at such a rapid rate – it is impossible to predict with any certainty how it will impact on our lives in coming years. When people make predictions about how technology will evolve, try this exercise. Look back ten years and think of all the technologies you take for granted today: social networks, smart phones, mobile Internet, tablet computing. None of them existed even a decade ago – or were so nascent an elite few were the only users.Think back a decade more and you will find yourself at the birth of the web. Adverts for major consumer products did not even feature URLs until the late 1990s. Now you see how difficult it is to predict what technologies will be common by 2015.There will always be winners and losers in the search for new ways to use technology to achieve business success. The downfall of companies such as Nokia, Kodak, and Blackberry illustrate the consequences of not understanding how society is changing and using new technologies.But one development that is likely to evolve further is technology outsourcing. As the world becomes more complex, it is even more unlikely that companies will retain the right kind of expertise internally. IT services will be outsourced more often because only the IT companies understand the complex technological solutions – rather than some of the drivers we saw a decade ago, such as labour arbitrage.The globalization of IT is itself becoming more complex anyway. There are still IT service companies all over the world offering their services, but now they don’t always need to directly contract with a customer to provide a specific service. The cloud-based model allows service providers to offer a specific service – storage or computing power – that can be turned on and off as desired. The app store model many people use on their phone can also be used in the enterprise to create an environment where end users on the business front-end (not the IT department) can choose and install technology solutions themselves.Change is taking place fast in the IT services market and nobody can predict how it will look in ten years, but one thing is for certain, IT experts need to offer a variety of delivery methods because enterprise IT is borrowing many of the ideas that consumers are already familiar with.