Technology does not drive change—it enables change. It constantly makes possible changing how we live and work, pushing the boundaries, challenging the status quo, and allowing innovation in every industry. The IT industry, which works on the relatively youngest technology, is creating the biggest changes conceivable in the shortest times, affecting our lives the most. For professionals working for IT(sic), the changes get multiplied many times and they need to keep themselves abreast with the latest trends of today to be able to fit in the skills required tomorrow.
This IBM Tech Trends Report highlights exactly that. IBM Developer Works conducted a survey of over 4,130 IT professionals from 93 countries, earlier this year, and published the results yesterday.
It would not be tough to guess that cloud development is the top trend, followed by better mobility management. These would be the results of any legitimate survey in today’s tech world. The IBM report confirms that with numbers. The main findings of the survey are:
- Business Analytics is the most adopted technology, with 49% organizations intending to use business analytics to increase automation.
- Mobile computing is established in the marketplace and offers a means for professional growth as more and more organizations get into building mobile apps, and Android—and not iOS—will be the preferred platform, with 70% of the participants looking forward to build apps for Google’s mobile platform against 49% for Apple’s.
- Good-old Java is still the most sought-after skillset, as a whopping 77% of the survey participants expressed confidence in it. Linux (56%) and Dot Net(50%) come next.
- 51% of respondents stated that adopting cloud technology is part of their mobile strategy.
- For cloud adopters, developing new applications, virtualization, and storage are expected to be the top activities in the next 24 months. 58% voters chose flexibility and scalability as the biggest motivator for adopting the cloud.
- India is adopting social business technology India may be all about social business technology (57% adopting), but other countries including Russia (19%) are more hesitant.
- Social business adoption varies across geographies and will continue to do so depending on how enterprises deal with security and local acceptance. India is already embracing social business adoption very strongly (57%), followed by the U.S. (45%) and China (44%).
- The three top social business capabilities that companies are utilizing today are file sharing, blogs and forums.
To sum it up, the 2011 Global Tech Trends Survey comes up with a clear indication that organizations are adopting and increasing investments in the areas of business analytics, mobile computing, cloud, and social business, which means these technologies have passed niche status, and are now part of organizations’ core IT focus and discussions. Also, the upward growth trends in these four areas suggest that there is a strong link between these technology and that adoption of one technology drives the demand for another.
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