This year marks the start of the third 25-year wave of ICT industry growth characterised by cloud services and mobile devices.
This is according to senior VP and chief analyst at IDC, Frank Gens, who delivered the keynote address at the Directions 2011 conference held in California, last month. The theme of his speech was 'Mobility, Clouds and Intelligent Industries - Positioning for the 3rd Wave of ICT Industry Growth'.
He said the first wave is characterised by mainframes and terminals, as well as a period where users were measured in millions and applications in thousands. “The second wave, which started in 1986, was the LAN/Internet client/server era that was characterised by hundreds of millions of users and tens of thousands of applications.”
However, this latest wave will be characterised by trillions of 'things', billions of users and millions of applications, he added.
Gens continued by drawing parallels with what happened in 1986 when many famous brands and companies didn't embrace the concepts of the second era and fell by the wayside; and the emergence of many new names who took advantage of the situation and exploited it.
“In the former category, names such as Cullinet, Digital and Wang spring to mind; while the latter included companies such as EMC, SAP and the raft of PC companies that emerged during this period.”
Gens said we will see a similar situation during the early years of this third era, where some well-known names may well disappear and several small start-ups emerge as key players.
This depends on whether they embrace the 'new realities' of this transition, which he has labelled The Intelligent Economy, like solutions that are mash-ups of mobile devices and applications, cloud services and big data/analytics; and, are vertical industry-oriented.
In the area of mobile devices and applications, there are already in excess of 1.3 million mobile applications and more than 400 million mobile devices that are application capable, he said.
“The issue will be to expand and prioritise these applications and find or create the new distribution model that has the associated characteristics to handle this situation and is also economically viable.”
Gens pointed out that in the area of cloud services, 80% of new applications will be developed for the cloud. “Thirty percent-plus of 2014 spending on enterprise applications will be via the cloud model with users developing strategies that are hybrid situations with a mixture of both private and public clouds.”
Nevertheless, he said, it is predicted that more than 80% of the Global 2000 list will still have lots of IT on-site in 2020.
“In the area of big data/analytics, we are looking at a 3 000 times [increase] when it comes to volume and velocity in 2014,” he said.
This means a growth from 1.8 zettabytes of data in 2011 to probably more than 10 zettabytes in 2014 (one zettabyte is one billion terabytes), which will mean that tools will need to be developed from the ground-up for the third-platform situation, he explained.
“Where 'bridging' strategies from the second era will turn out to be fatal for the vendors which choose to try and follow this route, as it was for those trying to bridge into the second era from the first.”
Gens advised vendors and users to recognise the platform shift, for example the third wave; prioritise solutions for this third platform; and transform their business models - a move that will include solutions that are non-silo-oriented.
This includes the use of the new third wave distribution models and these new realities as core to the value-add that vendors and users are seeking to provide. This will most likely necessitate the recruitment of new partners with third platform skills as current partners are optimised for the second platform.
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