Enterprise IT Trends in 2010

On New Year’s Day 2009 I proposed a toast to endurance in 2009 and better times in 2010. Unfortunately, 2009 did not really stand a chance of being considered an overall good year from day one, largely due to the recession that many think could have been prevented with better business insight and decision-making. The recession and the resulting business goals of improving decision-making, efficiency, and cost optimization are among the reasons that business intelligence and analytics, enterprise mashups, and cloud computing ranked highly in this year’s enterprise IT surveys such as the 2009 IBM Global CIO Study and the InformationWeek 500 report.

Now that autumn 2009 has begun and Q4 2009 begins next week, it’s time to predict and look forward to 2010. Burton Group, an IT research and advisory firm, did just that and today released its projection of five enterprise IT trends for 2010:

• Externalization, Consumerization and Globalization – Increasing use of external IT providers; more individual choices for devices and applications; increasing use of social networks
• Cloud Computing – Increasing use of cloud computing for competitive advantage, and maturity of cloud-computing solutions due to enterprise demand
• Data Center Transformation – Increasing use of virtualization and hybrids of internal and external IT providers to deliver business services
• Social Computing – Empowering worker interactions through social networking to create business value
• Wireless Everything – Increasing use of wireless networking and employee-owned wireless devices

According to Chris Howard, Burton Group executive analyst, “IT professionals find themselves at a critical junction in the decade beginning in 2010. Choosing one path, they have the opportunity to become proactive strategic partners within their businesses. Choosing another, they persist as a reactive organization that is gradually being eroded by the availability of commodity IT.” Howard also said, “If this plays out as Burton Group anticipates, enterprise IT will regain its proper place as a part of the business—not a separate entity that must somehow be aligned. True integration—beyond alignment—is achieved when the artificial distinction between ‘the business and ‘IT’ is eliminated altogether.”

Here are my five predictions for enterprise IT trends in 2010:

• Cloud computing will top the list of delivery preferences for IT business services, due to flexibility, rapid time to market, and optimal cost.
• Business intelligence (BI) and analytics will continue to be high-priority strategic initiatives for improved decision-making and business performance.
• Use of mashups to combine and visualize data from multiple web-facing sources will increase.
• Use of SaaS solutions for sales-enablement purposes such as pricie optimization and enterprise relationship management will increase.
• Concerns about integration, compliance, security, and privacy of cloud-computing solutions will be addressed and will decrease.

What are your five predictions for enterprise IT trends in 2010?