10 Technology Predictions For 2013 And Beyond
With 2013 approaching, it’s time for prediction-making season to start. Companies, non-profits, research groups and generally anyone else can break out their crystal ball and look at what they think the coming year will bring. Some are worth considering others not, but ultimately it’s a good exercise to think about the future and what you could be doing today to prepare or position yourself and your business for success.
Gartner, a leading IT research and advisory company released its 10 strategic tech trends for 2013 and beyond this week. Keep in mind these predictions are coming from an IT focused company so they are relevant to their audience, but these trends also affect everyone in some way, online marketers included. Take a look at the summary of their predictions and think about how those could affect you or your business.
- Mobile devices will continue their march towards dominance. Mobile web access will overtake the PC.
- The market will shift towards HTML5. Over the next few years, many mobile development tools will remain popular, but eventually, there will be a shift away from native apps to web apps.
- The personal cloud will grow, reducing digital content on PCs and it will become the common factor connecting many devices. As a result, mobile security, capability and management will become more important.
- Private enterprise App stores will become more common. Companies and groups will deliver apps to workers or members via private stores.
- The internet will become more integrated with the physical world. Consumer products, cars, health products, etc will all be connected to the web through sensors, images, NFC technologies and more.
- An emergence of an internal cloud services brokerage will occur. Better management of cloud services computing for many users will drive this.
- There will be a shift in storing strategic big data. Data will be split into multiple systems consisting of content management, data warehouses, data marts, and other specialized file systems instead of one big data warehouse.
- Actionable analytics will drive more decisions in companies. As capabilities grow and costs are reduced, data use in decision making will grow.
- In-memory computing will become mainstream, speeding up many processes.
- Tech ecosystems will become more integrated. The industry is moving away from loosely coupled approaches and more toward integrated systems for lower costs, ease of use and security.
Many of their predictions make sense, some seem like a stretch. Most believe mobile will continue its rapid growth but the timing for mobile to overtake PCs for web usage seems like a stretch. Cloud computing and all that comes along with that also seems like sure bets.
These predictions all point toward further development of mobile and web integration into the lives of people and with the proliferation of work and life integration which comes with trends like telecommuting and being connected to the web constantly, opportunities for mobile development, advertising, security applications and entertainment all come to mind as sure bets for online marketers. Ultimately it’s a good idea to keep an eye on trends and think about the future, because as quickly as technology changes, it’s easy to be left behind if you are not constantly adapting and improving as things change.
