According to Brocade the year 2013 will see fundamental changes in the IT industry, driven by a more demanding and IT-aware end user.
Brocade says that the year 2012 demonstrated that technology dominates people?s everyday life. For example, the summer Olympics illustrated how technology has obsessed the world has become. About 4.8 billion people watched the event, with digital viewers outnumbering traditional television viewers for the first time in history.
This single event epitomises how much society depends on networking technology. And while 2012 was a breakthrough year for broadcasters, enterprises and consumers, 2013 will see Software-Defined Networking (SDN) dominating the technology space.
According to Brocade, following are the top five technology trends that will dominate 2013:
1. Increasing SDN deployments ? The Summer Olympics have proved that consumer demand for information accessibility shows no sign of abating. However, as service providers try to meet increasing accessibility demand from consumers, they are struggling with the complexities of running a profitable business. For instance, to reduce CapEx (capital expenditure) and OpEx (operating expenditure) and increase service responsiveness ? service providers are looking for technology alternatives that will streamline service creation and foster innovative applications and services. SDN offers a means of achieving this. SDN links networks and applications, enabling direct programmatic control of both networks and orchestration layers in line with end-user application needs, rather than programming around the network, as is being done currently. With the promise of SDN architectures radically decreasing total cost of ownership, and vendor innovation/support continuing to increase. The year 2013 will witness SDN service deployments across the globe primarily in the United States and Japan.
2. Death of the ?Transaction-Based? user ? Users, whether business or consumer, are highly dependent on their internet-connected devices. In fact, more than 440 million mobile handsets were shipped in the third quarter of 2012, with more than 25 per cent of those being smartphones, indicating the user appetite for connectivity. However, with the roll-out of higher-performing networks (such as 4G and long-term-evolution) and devices that offer seamless connectivity, 2013 will be the year that will mark the decline of the ?transaction-based? user and the rise of the ?always-connected? user. (A ?transaction-based user? is an individual that will connect to the internet to conduct an activity (such as to make a purchase or to stream content), and then log off. The premise is that the user will sparingly use bandwidth and not rely on connectivity for every aspect of their life). Operators will compete for consumer loyalty by offering attractive pricing models, fuelling the trend for 24/7 connectivity. Businesses will leverage this phenomenon and increasingly turn to social media and communities to host a larger portion of their customer experience and support processes. While this will transform engagement models, to be successful, operators and business will need to ensure that their back-end networks can meet user expectations. In situations such as this, service disruption could affect the customer relationship.
3. Cloud under the microscope ? In 2011, Brocade predicted that non-IT organisations would move towards ?Cloud service provisioning? in order to uncover new ways of optimising and monetising cloud and service provider networks. For the next 12 months, this trend will continue, but in an evolved state. The businesses will scrutinise the impact of the cloud, its benefits, usage and return on investment (ROI) more than ever before. They will ask several questions like are deployments delivering the agility and cost savings predicted? Are users benefitting? How can one measure cloud ROI when, by design, the assets are not owned by the organissation? In 2013 IT organisations will attempt to take back control of their own assets (and budgets) and the deployment of private cloud architectures will accelerate during the second half of the year. IT organisations will also challenge the new breed of service provider by offering competing hosted services. This strategy will help them to increase revenue opportunities from a market that will be worth $73 billion by 2015. This will be good news for users, but will need to be accompanied by a thorough evaluation strategy to ensure that performance, resilience and cost models meet organisational expectations.
4. Customers bite back on vendor lock-in ? ?product de-siloing? is a clear macro-trend. Whether it is the flexibility to personalise applications on phone, or select the optional extras on vehicles, choice is paramount. Within the networking space, choice is even more imperative. As alliances ebb and flow, and integrated offerings continue to break into the mainstream, the importance of open architectures and multivendor solutions will become more prevalent in 2013. Trust is essential when building a network to support mission-critical applications, and enterprises will turn to trusted vendors to deploy flexible and scalable solutions. As such, those vendors not able to coexist in multivendor environments will struggle in this more demanding, and competitive, landscape. Only the agile and collaborative will survive in such a tough competitive environment.
5. Technology will begin to overcome human shortcomings ? There was a time when desktop icons did not exist?a time when a user had to manually type the name of an application in a shell-like text window to access applications. This was time-consuming, error-prone and frustrating, but the desktop icon revolutionised the user experience. Innovations such as this overcame human shortcomings and simplified the user experience. The year 2013 will see a lot of such innovations. Currently, there are exciting technologies such as voice-command devices. Further, modern smartphones can deliver communications, content and compute services in a single form-factor. There would be more such breakthroughs in 2013.
