What 10 IT Trends Will Shape Enterprises in 2016?

Guide

Today, enterprises must fend off agile tech startups by turning to IT for innovation and competitive advantage. In 2016, budgets will shift from infrastructure to application enablement, investing in development, analytics, and big data, setting the stage for key IT trends.

Trend 1: IT Skills and Role Transformation

Business is being reshaped by social, mobile, analytics, and cloud computing. IT must shed routine tasks, freeing staff from infrastructure management to focus on cloud implementation, analytics, DevOps, mobile, and business solutions, requiring cultural change and leadership support.

Trend 2: DevOps Accelerates Application Delivery

DevOps will play a larger role in speeding up application delivery. It is a software development approach where operations and development engineers collaborate throughout the application lifecycle to achieve higher IT performance. Companies with high IT performance are twice as likely to exceed profit, market share, and productivity goals.

Trend 3: Data Warehouses Transition to Data Lakes

Big‑data analytics deals with massive heterogeneous data from diverse sources. Data lakes aggregate these raw data sources together for direct analysis and can integrate with existing data warehouses, avoiding wasted investment.

Trend 4: IT Takes Control of Analytics Platform Configuration

Enterprise leaders are investing in analytics platforms, recognizing IT’s importance for security, data privacy, integration, and service levels. This reverses the situation where isolated analytics tools created data silos.

Trend 5: Converged Services Replace Reference Architectures

Implementation of converged solutions is gradually supplanting reference architectures that bundle best practices. Converged infrastructure offers more advanced platforms, better resource coordination, higher cost efficiency, and time savings.

Trend 6: Momentum from In‑Memory Databases

In today’s real‑time business environment, fast reporting and analytics provide a clear competitive edge, driving stronger adoption of in‑memory databases. SAP’s move to S/4 HANA, combined with integrated solutions and cloud providers, simplifies IT and fuels this shift.

Trend 7: Flash Devices Begin Replacing High‑Performance Hard Drives

TB‑scale flash devices, offering superior capacity‑cost ratios, can now compete with 15K SAS drives. Consequently, most storage systems delivered in 2016 will include a significant flash component, improving response times and reducing storage management costs.

Trend 8: Enterprises Prepare for the Next‑Generation Cloud

Research from The Economist highlights best practices for maximizing cloud benefits, including better vendor selection, task‑appropriate cloud services, effective use of integration tools, and leveraging cloud to improve operations and employee productivity.

Trend 9: Pure‑Play Infrastructure Vendors Face Pressure

As IT focuses more on application delivery, analytics, and IoT, pure infrastructure companies will see declining revenues. They may spin off units, acquire new infrastructure firms, or merge to achieve economies of scale, ultimately integrating IT with operational technology for IoT, public safety, transportation, health, and life‑science solutions.

Trend 10: IT Leads the Third‑Platform Initiative

During the enterprise transformation driven by the “third platform” (social, mobile, analytics, cloud), IT will play a proactive leadership role. Contrary to the view that IT is a passive enabler, its value lies in meeting security, data protection, availability, and collaboration requirements, preventing information silos and redundant work.