Storage is big in Accenture’s quinquennial snapshot of IT trends
Mary Jander at Byte and Switch talked to Accenture’s chief scientist Kishore Swaminathan about IT’s future. He outlines eight trends driving their planning. Lots in common with Byte and Switch’s view on storage networking trends I posted on a while back.
What do these trends mean for storage? Datacenters-as-a-service. Per Swaminathan,
Hardware is going more and more toward scale, to the point where it won’t be economical for anyone to run a small data center.
Sounds like the future of IT resembles what’s going on inside the dataplexes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. today.
Another key trend mentioned in the Accenture story is the continued increase in what they call Shadow IT. I am firmly convinced that the line between consumer and enterprise technology is already so blurry as to be unrecognizable. Maybe the bill for a Blackberry goes to the corporate AmEx and an iPhone to the personal MasterCard, but I’ll bet the messages that are sent and received daily regularly mix business and personal. At conferences I regularly see people using Gmail for business purposes.
For those of us developing products, this means we need to think of specific customers and use cases, not “designed for enterprise” or “designed for consumer”. Ease of use, reliability, security & privacy, energy efficiency – all these need to be best-in-class for all computing and storage products.