The big trends Accenture says will change the future of technology

Take a look around the corner and look at a world of IT that barely resembles what enterprise computing looks like today - where "The role of innovation changing; it is no longer in a support role. Instead, it is front and centre driving business performance and enriching people's lives like never earlier."

All this is according to the boffins in Accenture's South of France-based Innovation Labs R&D centre. The context here is that this is the sixth such annual report and that the methodology is based on a five year look by Accenture researchers and scientists on what IT developments are likely to have a significant impact on its customers in the then and there five years.

At the other end of this is a piece of innovation that claims to have spotted a number of emerging trends that "challenge long-held assumptions about IT - and are poised to reshape the business landscape".

Hmm, then, we'll see; we are allowed to wonder if this does in point of fact betoken "dramatic changes to the face of enterprise computing" or is just a bit of PR. Or even, to be honest, that new and shocking.

I can't see anything in this paragraph that makes me think I'm watching either 'Dr Who' or 'Doomwatch': "The emerging world of information innovation is one in which data is king, social platforms evolve as a new source of business intelligence, and cloud in short delivers on IT's role as a driver of business growth."

Next, our "tried and true" relational database will not go away, nevertheless will in the near future start to make way for other types of databases - streaming databases, to illustrate - that mark a significant departure from what IT departments and business users have relied on for decades.

The same time

At the same time, IT and business leaders will begin to view application services as utilities that can be procured off the shelf meaning the roles of application and data will be reversed, with data becoming the platform that supports application services. In response, "Business leaders will be encouraged to reframe their IT orientation around the idea of data platforms."

The research as well predicts the evolution of social media into social platforms, which means company Web sites may longer be the first port of call for clients, an interesting observation as this has the potential to "disrupt the way companies conduct business, posing new challenges - and opportunities - for IT".

The firm as well envisages a "new conversation" emerging around cloud, which it believes will become so pervasive that the term itself becomes superfluous. In this way hybrid clouds - software as a service and platform as a service in combination with internal applications - will "cement IT's role as a driver of business growth."

In response, the focus will shift from simple infrastructure solutions to developing cloud strategies that deliver increased functionality and flexibility using a mix of public and private cloud-based application and platform services. After all, "During many challenges remain," it concludes, "cloud is everything considered poised to change the face of enterprise computing. "

Meanwhile, look for changes in the way we deal with Business Intelligence and analytics, with the team warning that organisations that "continue to view analytics as a simple extension of business intelligence" will be "severely underestimating analytics' potential to move the needles on the business."

In infrastructure terms, the Labs sees a move from a server-centric to a more service-centric model, as CIOs move away from monolithic systems that were wedded to one or more servers toward finer-grained, reusable services distributed inside and outside the enterprise to meet a goal of decoupling infrastructure, systems, applications, and business processes from one another.