<div>The year 2015 will bring accelerated disruption in terms of technology. The industry's rapid adoption of next-generation platforms and services will be centered on cloud, mobility, big data and the Internet of Things. <br /><br />From ‘computing anywhere’ mobile to risk-based security, and from the Internet of Things (IoT) to cognitive analytics, the gap between digital leaders and digital laggards will be widening significantly over the next twelve months. <br /><br />As we are in 2015, here’s a look some emerging and disruptive technology trends that are poised to take off in a big way.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><strong>The Digital Data Supply Chain </strong></span><br />In 2014, businesses continued looking for technology to assist in compiling the droves of data being delivered about a customer’s every movement. The success factor in 2015 for many organizations hinges on their ability to close the gap between available data and actionable insight. CMO’s are continuing to take the lead in promoting the use of data to fuel customer engagement improvements. Analytics spending will increase, but less of it will be visible in the CIO's budget. Marketing and other business departments will drive analytics investments to address specific challenges and opportunities.<br /><br />Hence, 2015 will be a year of increased fragmentation as reliance on analytics spreads across organizations. More cloud-based and mobile analytics, more demand for interactive and responsive analytics, and more use of specialist and niche BI are monopolizing the trends. <br /><br /><strong>Digital Data Chain Gets Stronger: </strong>While big data and analytics persisted as buzzwords over the last few years, actual adoption by enterprises has been limited. In 2015, we’ll see more enterprises moving away from traditional investments and switching focus to big data. The quantum of data analyzed for actionable insights will increase dramatically over the next five years and this will be reflected in 2015 with the ‘context’ dimension becoming even more important in the big data stack.<br /><br /><strong>The Rise of Cognitive Intelligence:</strong> Capable of understanding the subtleties, idiosyncrasies, idioms and nuance of human language, cognitive analytics mimic how humans reason and process information. With the advancement of data science, future systems will have a ‘built-in’ cognitive ability to decipher the meaning from large data and answer queries based on hypothesis and confidence from data. IBM Watson is one such example.<br /><br /><strong>Mainstreaming of Analytics: </strong>While there has been limited acceleration towards Predictive & Prescriptive Analytics, this is set to change in 2015, with the former heading towards mainstream adoption, particularly in areas like retail banking, CPG and the weather industry.<br /><br /><strong>Infrastructure and Analytics: </strong>The world of big data is expanding quickly and adding value requires establishing speed and confidence in every decision, interaction and process. Thus, analytic infrastructure - the applications, services, utilities and systems that are used for either preparing data for modeling, estimating models, validating models, scoring, or related activities – will become critically important in 2015. Organizations are currently forced to think about how to usher in more intelligence in infrastructure monitoring and how to perform ‘deep dive’ analytics on the barrage of infrastructure data they have access to. <br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><strong>The Maturity of Cloud Computing and the new role of DevOps<br /></strong></span>Cloud computing made significant strides in 2014 and has become an integral, perhaps even the most vital part of an enterprise’s IT Strategy. It has helped free-up a huge chunk of IT from the constrictions of legacy software and hardware licensing data center models, and has opened, revolutionized and to an extent democratized the way IT delivers services and how the users access information, applications and business services. <br /><br />When our clients ask “Where do we go with Cloud now?,” here are three cloud computing trends that will be responsible for driving cloud strategies through 2015 and enterprise organizations should factor into their cloud-planning processes in order to run at the speed of change.<br /><br /><strong>Hybrid Computing: </strong>As cloud services continue to expand in number and sophistication, gaps in managing cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-core portfolios are beginning to appear, leading to new and smarter ways to operate in this hyper-hybrid IT environment. As a precursor to application virtualization, hybrid computing combines and coordinates multiple cloud services, internal network and application resources to form a unified environment for businesses. <br /><br /><strong>Containerisation of Cloud: </strong>Containers are a bit like virtual machines in that they make it possible to bundle up several different pieces of software and run them on a single server without interference. Yet, unlike a traditional virtual machine created with tools from companies like VMware, a Docker container doesn’t require its own operating system. All cloud majors (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) are heavily investing in Docker and Open Source Container tools as containerization has the potential to finally bring interoperability between cloud platforms. <br /><br /><strong>DevOps and Cloud: </strong>As cloud adoption accelerates, collaboration between development and operations teams becomes even more important. For organizations adopting Agile development methodologies and cloud computing, DevOps and continuous delivery practices enable agility for infrastructure, providing organizations with the rapid deployment of new functions and features. Cloud-based DevOps is paving the way to leverage the full potential of cloud application development and the closer integration of various process areas quickly and cost effectively. <br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><strong>The Internet of Things – The Connected World </strong></span><strong><br /></strong>“In 2015, there will be roughly 25 billion "things" connected to the Internet. By 2020, the number of things connected to the Internet will be approximately seven times greater than the number of people on earth today. And by 2050, that number is projected to reach 50 billion,” according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers annual Digital IQ study.<br /><br /><strong>IoT’s Chapter Two: </strong>The IoT trend is about to enter a second stage in development, focused on software application platforms that provide prebuilt connectivity, security, management, and analytics capabilities. As the IoT focus shifts away from devices and networks - toward platforms and applications - CIOs and CTOs will play a key role in facilitating their business units to better understand how to incorporate the IoT into business technology agendas.<br /><br /><strong>IoT Gets Real: </strong>After months, if not years, of IoT hype, we’ll finally see a focus on actual customer success stories about improved machine uptime, better customer experience, and new as-a-service business models. IoT's impact on the supply chain is beginning to demonstrate sustainable business practices and business intelligence (BI) will also have a greater play, as we finally extract meaningful results out of the data collected and not the data itself.<br /><br /><strong>It’s All About Software: </strong>IoT software platforms will become the rage, displacing the hardware. Much of the early hype has been about cool new sensors, high-tech wearables, and new wireless technologies. Now, in 2015, we’ll see increased focus on the software and especially the cloud services, to make all these sensors connect, upload data, and drive analytics that generate insights and enable business improvements.<br /><br /><strong>The Year of Bolt-On/ Wearables: </strong>In this era of the digital world, we predict that we’ll see huge actions happening in the region on extracting data from everything (Humans, Machines, utility devices) and in making BOLT-ONs or Standalone intelligent wearables. This forms the base for the IoT to become a real-world actionable item in a humongous way. <br /><br />With the amalgamation of the real and virtual worlds, connectivity everywhere, the inundation of intelligence everywhere, and the accumulative technological impact of the digital business shift, businesses are asking – if not demanding – their technology partners to run faster with a disruptive frame of mind. These technology partners need to focus on finding new ways to participate, harness, and advance early adoption and innovation at the edge. As our customers continue to leverage technology for digital transformation, the year 2015 will definitely push the limits of where technology can go - as a way to bridge the gap between existing and new solutions, between business and IT - to create real value and genuine growth for customers.<br /><br /><br /><br /> </div>
