Clouds roll in for PC's big birthday bash

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 14 December 2010 16:16

Business IT - Technology

The personal computer as we know it turns 30 next year, but its position in the computing hierarchy has crumbled courtesy of the cloud and mobile devices.  And 2011 is promising more of the same.

Clouds, clouds and more clouds are the general forecast for the 12 months ahead with industry pundits unanimous in their enthusiasm for the computing approach which delivers access to elastic computing services and applications.

Instead of office workers being tethered to corporate applications on or via their PC, they can use pretty much any device to access cloud based applications or computer power.  Gartner has already predicted that by 2014, 90 percent of organisations will support corporate applications on personal devices and that by 2013 80 per cent of organisations will support workforces using tablets.

It also believes that besides using public clouds and developing internal clouds, enterprises outside the IT sector will start to sell excess capacity on their private clouds to third parties - radically reshaping the IT sector landscape.

Brenton Smith, vice president and general manager, ANZ at CA Technologies believes that; ''While 2010 may have been the year of cloud talk, 2011 is the year of cloud action.' He's not alone - on Thursday HP will release more detail from a report conducted on its behalf by Springboard Research which has found that 78 percent of Australian organisations now view cloud as relevant to their business, and 61 percent are either currently using or planning cloud initiatives.

The advent of smartphones and tablet devices will further spur demand for cloud based services. And for anyone who thinks the iPad is a passing fad; a study released in late November by Telsyte predicted that over 1 million tablet devices will be sold in Australia in 2011.

According to CA; 'The consumerisation of IT also means that smart mobile devices, like tablets and iPads, will start displacing laptops as the device of choice for employees. While many enterprises have tried to resist the deployment of these devices, user demand has been too strong to resist.

'As a result, technology and services will be delivered differently and there will be an array of new IT challenges, specifically security and authentication to be managed. '

Leading futurist Ross Dawson today released a swag of predictions for 2011, among them a suggestion that during the year there will be an; 'Explosive inflection point of almost everything we know shifting to mobile. The infinite resources of the web are used mainly on mobile devices, location-based services give us context whe'er (sic) we go, and printed newspapers and magazines are supplanted by the iPad. Our entire world will be wherever we are.'