The ICT environment is characterised by unrelenting technological progress and incremental innovation. Furthermore, the ICT sector is periodically swept by waves of radical innovation, deeply transforming production, distribution and usage patterns, which have always led to new thresholds of pervasiveness of information infrastructures in the economy and the society. This happened with the advent of personal computers in the 80s, of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 90s, and is now expected to happen again, in the next decade or so, with the next generation of the Internet (the Future Internet paradigm) characterised by unprecedented, seamless connectivity and mobility. In addition, there are relevant evolutions ongoing affecting the development, distribution and delivery of ICT solutions and services, and emerging ICT-based business models (such as the so- called Enterprise 2.0 environment, transferring the main features of social computing to the business world). Technological innovation plays an important part in these trends but is by no means the only driving factor, actually for most of these developments business and organizational innovation represents the key drivers.
The sub-scenarios are focused on ICTs business demand (excluding the consumer/home market, which is less relevant for the demand-supply of e-skills). The analysis of main innovation trends is differentiated in three main sector groups as follows:
ICT industry: the definition used in this study includes software, IT services, communication services, and computer manufacturing. This excludes microelectronics and industrial automation machinery
The user industry: this includes all the manufacturing and service industry using ICTs in their production function; these user industries may have high or low ICT budgets and ICTs may be used for both production or distribution functionalities.
Fig. 5: The main technological innovation trends of the ICT industry
140 The main technological trends
The ICT industry is currently in the midst of a shift to a new technological innovation trajectory built on mobile devices and apps, cloud services, mobile broadband networks, Big Data analytics, and social technologies, as shown in the picture above. Based on the ICT estimates, by 2020, at least 80% of the ICT industry’s growth will be driven by these new technologies.
Mobile devices and Apps
Devices, applications and networks are all going to be dramatically affected by the mobile trajectory. IDC predictions estimate that in 2012, for the first time, the spending from these devices exceeds that for PCs. From 2012 forward, there will be a fast increase in smartphone demand, which will drive in a few years to a mass market. Within the mobile revolution, the mobile apps published will grow very fast as well and users downloading mobile apps will massively increase. The demand trend for the mobile devices and apps will very much depend on the general economic trends, but for sure this is the technology driver of the next years towards the 2020.
Among the most relevant opportunities provided by the mobile devices and apps, there is the connection and integration the social networking services, with cloud application platforms, with analytics offerings or with commerce offerings. Such integrations provide relevant technology trends in both citizens services and business supply chain.
Cloud services
Over the next several years, cloud services will largely replace client/server as the dominant model for application and solution delivery. For the past two or three years, much of the strategic action around cloud services has been about vendors and users getting their feet wet, most often around cloud infrastructure services. In 2012, the strategic moves in the cloud services world are going to shift to the application platforms and the race to build the largest portfolios and ecosystems around those platforms.
The fastest-growing cloud services segment will be platform as a service (PaaS) and constitutes a strategic beachhead in the cloud.
For the past three years, the largest players in the IT industry have been intensely focused on building cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and app platforms (PaaS). IDC analysis predicts a massive buildout in 2012–2014 of cloud solutions/apps on top of these platforms. The large majority of new apps will be distributed/deployed via the cloud. The traditional model for enterprise application distribution and deployment is quickly being obsolete by the cloud PaaS/app store model, which is far less complex and costly for developers.
Besides, in the upcoming years, organizations will accelerate their movement of legacy enterprise apps to the cloud. Until now, the chief customers for public cloud IaaS have been commercial B2C companies. From now on, because of licensing changes and a desire for deployment flexibility on the part of enterprise IT organizations, more enterprise apps will run on public clouds.
Big data
Integrated data and analytics technologies are going to move from niche to mainstream adoption, based on the following factors.
A market-wide migration to in-memory technology will rapidly accelerate. Moreover, analytic functionality will migrate into the database. Functionality such as reporting engines, scoring engines, spatial information management extensions, and data transformation will be increasingly embedded within databases. This embedding is being done to speed up the performance of the software because it reduces "overhead" associated with running multiple, layered software products. The ability to take advantage of the performance, scalability, security, and manageability
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of the latest databases to perform these functions will decrease the need to purchase separate software for them.
Social Technologies and Interactive network of things
While social technologies (especially as they're being accelerated by mobile technologies) are from now on a mandatory part of the next technological trajectories, also sensors, tags and “communicating things” in general are going to be part of the Network.
Internet of things refer to the Internet-based embedded solutions capable of linking billions of devices (cameras, sensors, etc.) and objects interacting over a network. Based on IDC predictions, the number of installed intelligent communicating devices on the network will outnumber “traditional computing” devices by almost 2 to 1. This will change the way people think about interacting with each other and with devices on the network.
From now on, there will be an acceleration in the use of microblogging technology — best known for people-to-people communication services like Twitter and Foursquare — for people to follow the "state" of things that are relevant to them. Besides, there will be over 3.5 billion connected industrial products (including cars, planes, and boats), appliances/toys, and entertainment devices connected and communicating over the Internet. These devices will have the ability to share information about their "state" in terms of the need for service, availability for use, time of arrival, and so forth. Microblogging and location/mapping will emerge as ways for consumers to manage their relationship with the devices and objects they deem most relevant to the tasks that they need to undertake on a daily basis. This could include a Twitter-like feed to "follow" the status of a connected appliance in your house to see if it's operating correctly or if it needs service. In addition to appliances, consumers will be able to "follow" objects and services, such as cities for the best location for parking or mass transit for the exact time of arrival for a train or bus. The inverse is true as well, where devices could "follow" people. This could be very useful in the health space, where the ability to track patients' vital signs or medication compliance can be essential to care.