Business Value Hype Will Drive Enterprises In 2011

Enterprises worldwide have been wading through a maze of hype around latest and disruptive technology innovations. However, the year 2011 is likely to bring back some rationality as enterprises are expected to cut through this maze.

According to Constellation Research's Outlook for 2011, enterprises are expected to adopt business value as the common operating principle, and will seek pragmatic, creative and disruptive solutions that achieve both profitability and market differentiation.

Challenges in Store for 2011

Based on this key finding, the research report cites three key challenges that enterprises will need to overcome in 2011. These include:

• Assessing the right disruptive technologies for the organisation; requiring to link back to business strategy; and to reinvest in research budgets and internal processes that inform,
  disseminate, and prepare the organisation for an increasing pace in technology adoption.
  
  
• Identifying where these disruptive technologies can create differentiation through new business models, grow new profit pools via new experiences, and deliver market efficiencies that save money and time.
  
  
• With budgets expected to remain from flat to incremental growth in 2011, and with new projects in the pipeline, supporting new business models and disruptive technologies will require organisations to find ways to optimise existing investments. This will mean reducing the cost of existing investments and leveraging the existing infrastructure to achieve higher business value.

• IT will be supporting at least two devices per person as organisations see employees using different devices, like tablets, smartphones, laptops, etc. for different apps.
  
  
  
• Despite announcements by major vendors, the cost model for replacing on-premise based voice equipment will not justify moving voice communications to the cloud in 2011.
  
  
  
• 2011 will be the year when SaaS providers find the issue of security turning from a perceived weakness of their offerings to a perceived strength as enterprises realise that their in-house IT team is unable to match the level of security offered by SaaS providers.
  
  
  
• Forecasts in cloud security breaches will call for partly cloudy cloud adoption. Despite the woes in on-premise security and move to the cloud, cyber attacks will force companies to move from public clouds to private clouds in 2011. Hybrid models for apps in the public cloud and data in the private cloud emerge as users migrate from on-premise models.
  
  
  
• Android will become more enterprise friendly by fixing major manageability issues.
  
  
• The social media landscape will undergo an interesting transformation as it ushers in a genre of information commerce and the 3C's of social content