Top IT trends in 2018

digital infrastructure
 Trend 1: Speed trumps cost

to choose
speed cost.

IT leaders will intensify their efforts to identify

and eliminate the inhibitors of speed.
the technologies and platforms
 Balancing act

corporate industry data privacy

policies rules laws.

• investment, governance ability to

technology rule execute at
speed.
 Trend 2: Leveraging tools that support
innovation and differentiation is critical
• In 2018, businesses need to embrace innovation by
leveraging new tools that enable their developers to create
new sources of competitive differentiation.
• Developers need access to new tools and the flexibility to
create business models. They have to be able to support new
application types, using modern development and
deployment tools, particularly in the area of containerisation.
• organisations that aggressively embrace these tools and make
it available to their development teams will be winners. And
those that fail to act will see their competitive edge being
eroded.
 Trend 2: (cont)
• Exploit the SaaS evolution – so you can focus on what
differentiates you
• Increasingly, we’ll see businesses that are successfully accelerating
their digital transformation focusing on using SaaS for non-
differentiating processes. This will allow them to reap the benefit
of the continuous SaaS industry revolution, and the economies of
scale and standardisation that these products afford them.
• Using SaaS to ensure that their non-core focus areas are running
optimally will enable organisations to focus their resources on
creating and evolving their differentiation capability elsewhere –
for example, in their manufacturing or CRM environments, or in
the development of custom customer-facing applications.
 Trend 3: The rise of the API economy

• Increasingly, businesses are recognising the importance of APIs as an enabler to

develop revenue-generating applications and services. This evolution has been
dubbed ‘the rise of the API economy’.
• In 2018, I predict that organisations will start to see the wisdom in standardising on a
set of APIs. We’ll see IT decision-makers move away from evaluating tools,
technologies, and services purely on the basis of their features and capabilities.
• The API’s maturity and availability, and how easily it allows the implementation of
processes, rather than performance will become more important. Increasingly,
businesses are looking to exploit the software-driven nature of these environments.
• It’s all about abstraction
• In the year ahead, businesses will be challenged to keep up with the pace of change
of APIs. They’ll need to ensure that they can invest in relevant programming to drive
their business objectives.
• The type and number of APIs that organisations select will depend on several
factors, including the extent to which they want or need to abstract away the
underlying technologies.
Trend 4: Shifting focus from technologies to services architectures

• In 2018, in addition to investing in the appropriate APIs to enable abstraction, businesses

will need to revisit their architectures and ensure that they’re fit-for-purpose and future-
proof.
• There’s a clear acceptance in the industry that hybrid IT is the model of the future.
However, hybrid IT has significant architectural implications which organisations will
need to address.
• Over the last decade, IT teams have focused much of their energies on technology
integration. The advent of hybrid IT has changed the paradigm: mastering hybrid IT
requires you to instead focus on services integration. Most organisations’ existing
architectures were not built with this theme in mind.
• Composition of services
• It’s important to determine which services must co-ordinate with others and how they
all need work together to deliver the business outcome and a positive user experience.
• If you attempt to bring together different services components without first
implementing the appropriate architecture, you run the risk of delivering a poor,
inconsistent user experience. As the services start to become more complex, your ability
to scale it and deliver with quality, will be limited
Trend 5: Push to manage the business value of data

• In 2018, there’ll be an intensified focus on exploiting the value of data, and ensuring that
it’s provided to those who need it, when they need it – this a truly data-centric view of
IT.
• The advent of all-flash storage means that there’s less need for organisations to be
concerned about different storage types and tiers. In addition, today you can architect so
that cost is not an issue, by moving to an all-flash option to make your business faster.
• What’s more important is the fact that as organisations transform into digital business,
the role of data is taking on greater significance. Now, the emphasis is on finding new
value in your data – and being able to leverage the value of that data faster.
• At the 2017 Tour de France, our data analytics platform incorporated machine learning
and complex algorithms to combine live and historical race data. This provided deeper
levels of insight during the 23-day event. It also provided cycling fans with a better
understanding about the environments and circumstances in which riders perform best.
• This is a good example of how the Internet of Things is enabling organisations to find
new sources of data and to extract new value from it
Trend 6: Programmable infrastructure everywhere

• In recent years, developers’ focus has been on the level of computing requirements
they anticipated they’d need, rather than networking and security considerations.
Thanks to the advent of programmable data centre infrastructure, this will change in
2018.
• We’ll see more businesses considering network and security requirements in the
development phase. We’ll also see them programming their applications to take
advantage of software-defined infrastructure.
• Network and security services that enable you to move and protect your data can be
provisioned to provide on-demand connectivity and security as applications flex,
based on changes in business requirements. Infrastructure becomes a ‘living and
breathing’ entity that enables the notion of digital business to become a reality.
• The technology will allow organisations to challenge their infrastructure status-quo
and rethink basic principles using flexibility, programmability and software-defined
as cornerstones. This technology transformation could be used as a lever to unlock
operational transformation, and in some cases, financial transformation through
emerging IT consumption models.