Clipping - Tenological Trends a step back to reassess opportunities

How much information technology news has been written this year that started with cloud computing, mobility, big data and social business? And in most of them, perhaps the main factor was left unsaid: it is necessary to have feet on the ground and a clear strategy on how to walk through this sea triggered by these trends.

 

Cloud computing and mobility, by the way, haven't been trends for a while. Among the four macro themes, these two came out ahead for many companies, as consumerization and the model of delivery and contracting of solutions through the internet facilitated access. The other two were wrapped in a lot of information, but little treatment, creating a bubble of doubt.

 

To try to take a step back and observe the scenario in a broader and more concrete way, CRN Brasil organized the “IT Mídia Debate: Apostas Tecnológicas”, which had the participation of Fernando Belfort, from Frost & Sullivan; Fernando Meirelles, from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV); José Carlos Padilha, former CIO and IT consultant; Jorge Sukarie, from Brasoftware; and Vânia Curiati, from IBM.

 

For Belfort, the maturity levels of trends in the country are quite different. Cloud computing is minimally known and proofs of concepts are taking place, and this is a time when the cloud is maturing. Mobility is the most tangible trend, big data represents the biggest opportunity, but also the biggest confusion, because neither suppliers nor customers still know how to conceptualize and implement actions in this sense, and social business is a bubble that mixes from collaboration to social networks, passing by CRM, BI and other things, he says.

 

And in the market you can find everything, says Meirelles, noting that there are companies that implement the most different technologies as early adopters, to those companies that just want to run a consolidated technology. And that is why, according to the professor, measuring the wave of adoption of these four trends within a package is very difficult.

 

“Big data and social are trends that are being digested by both consumers and suppliers”, adds Jorge Sukarie, who in addition to founder of Brasoftware is president of the Brazilian Association of Software Companies (Abes). He recalls that, even in the midst of the discussions, the Brazilian IT industry should have the highest growth rate in the world in 2013, with an estimated revenue of US$ 69 billion, according to data from the association.

 

What is known for sure is that the sum of these four macro trends is the watershed from what was done before to what will be seen in the coming years, points out Vânia, from IBM. “Trading partners across all technologies are undergoing a transformation aligned with the use of these technologies, as are customers. If they don't fit into this era of solutions, they tend to disappear”, predicts the executive, who says that, although there is a great effort by the industry to create effective tools for these technologies, the moment is for experimentation on many levels.

 

For Padilha, the issue of technology adoption and levels of experimentation collide with a single point: either it proves that the adoption of something will bring a return, or it becomes difficult to buy/sell. And this raises the need for IT to talk about business and for business areas to understand a little about IT. Perhaps this is the space where the channel aimed at services and consulting gains prominence, being the hand that seals the union between the practical vision of the business with the technological load.