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used can be increased and decreased instantly in line with business requirements. In a cloud-centred environment, IT will become commoditised, he says. Gartner analyst Mark McDonald says business technologies are transitioning from heavy owner-operated solutions to lighter-weight services and social media technologies like virtualisation, cloud computing and Web 2.0 social computing. He says these strategic technologies are of increasing importance to the CIO. Exploiting them provides the cost, capacity and capability gains needed to define, source, create and deploy information- and process-intensive solutions that will reshape IT and its future role. These technologies can be implemented quickly and without significant upfront expense. Instead of investing millions to get millions in benefits, with these technologies, up-front investments are measured in thousands of dollars to get those same benefits, says Gartner. McDonald says, These technologies, implemented properly, create the opportunity for IT to change its role and the operational performance of the enterprise. Asymmetric technologies like virtualisation, cloud and Web 2.0 enable companies to get out from under a front-loaded heavy investment model that limits ITs agility and flexibility. Gartner says worldwide cloud services revenue is expected to reach $68.3bn this year, a 16.6% increase from 2009 revenue of $58.6bn. By 2014, says the analyst, cloud services revenue is projected to reach $148.8bn. Gartner analyst Ben Pring says, The scale of application deployments is growing. Multithousand-seat deals are increasingly common and IT managers are thinking strategically about cloud service deployments. More-progressive enterprises are thinking through what their IT operations will look like in a world of increasing cloud service leverage. After many years of germination, most notably in the software-as-a-service arena, the core ideas at the heart of cloud computing such as pay for use, multi-tenancy and external services appear to be resonating more strongly. Pring says growth in the cloud services market is partly down to macroeconomic factors. He says the financial turbulence of the last 18 months has meant every organisation scrutinising every expenditure. An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility is hard to ignore against this backdrop, he says. Empowering workers with agile communications The concept of empowering a workforce with agile IT extends to communications. Gartner predicts that social networking services in the cloud will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for communications for 20% of business users by 2014. Gartner analyst Monica Basso says, In the past, organisations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications. Today, social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles. Gartner says newer employees will enter the workforce with a predisposition to communicate via a social network, but they will use e-mail in parallel. The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities, says Basso. Gartner predicts that the percentage of e-mail accounts on cloud services will grow to 10% by year-end 2012, up 7% from 2009. It says mobile business agility will also be extended through the use of smart phones. By 2012, says Gartner, contact lists, calendars and messaging clients in all smart phones will be social-enabled applications. Analyst Forrester Research says there is also progress towards supporting agile mobile business processes. Although the adoption of mobile business processes is well behind the take-up of mobile business e-mail and calendars, says Forrester, firms are expected to increase their adoption as suppliers launch more easier-to-deploy packaged solutions. Forrester recently published its Mobile Applications will Empower Enterprise Business Processes report, which says mobile applications for business use are receiving a great deal of attention from package application software vendors and considerable interest from business process professionals at firms.
Verizon says...