The global IT landscape is in the middle of a revolution, and more technological changes will happen in the next 30 years, making the landscape almost unrecognisable from what it is today.
Gartner analyst Steve Prentice says the world is in the middle of a revolution from an analogue to a digital realm. Quoting Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev`s 50- to 60-year cycle theory, he says the midpoint occurred in 2000, with the dot-com boom and bust.
In the next 30 years, he says, technology will reach every individual in every part of society.
One billion PCs have, over time, entered the marketplace. While this figure is expected to grow, PCs will be eclipsed by other means of connecting to the Internet, working and communicating.
There are about 50 billion processors globally in digital devices, a figure expected to reach more than 200 billion in the next few years, he says. About $470 billion will be spent on hardware and software, with another $670 billion going to IT services in 2006, says Prentice.
Trends
However, as prices fall, IT becomes commoditised and more consumer-focused, one of the pairs of trends that will mark the landscape over the next three years. As an example, he cites storage requirements growing at 50% a year, while memory cost is falling at 30% a year.
This commoditisation will cause a fundamental shift in the working environment, says Prentice. He sees knowledge workers making use of their own PCs on enterprise networks, which raises issues around security. Prentice also sees the line between work and home eroding as more people connect in a virtual community.
He paints a picture of a technological society that will discard servers as they break. Prentice points to Google`s over 170 000 servers built using tera-architecture that replicate information, making the "death" of a server a non-issue.
However, he warns that, with the increasing need for power, cooling and speed, companies are going to have to face the issue of "green IT". Electricity, he says, is the single biggest cost of running a data centre, and companies will feel the pressure of having to be energy efficient and environment friendly.
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