IBM Academy of Technology Top Technology Trends 2015

One of the most interesting intellectual exercises in Information technology domain is to predict which are next technology  trends and topics giving that in our industry things, probably, change more frequently than of the industries (of course, someone could also argue that  sometime topics are re-named or are Déjà vu, but this is another story  🙂

For someone this could be a pure exercise but for others this is fundamental knowledge to see how and where investments are pointing in next future.

During last 4 years we leveraged IBM Academy of Technology (IBM AoT) community to collectively collects thoughts of  IBM experts from around the world working at all levels of IT to generate our top technology list.

Starting from 2012, we repeated this process every year with the main aim to build and update the IBM AoT investigation agenda.

This year with Andrea Martin (current President of IBM AoT) and Rashik Parmar (former President of IBM AoT) we thought that it could be also valuable to share our agenda and our investigation priorities outside IBM believing that this sort of point of view could benefit IBM clients and the whole IT community and not, in general.

So, the result of our analysis that individuates a number of top technology trends for 2015, or “themes” as we use to say, is summarized in a white paper in the IBM Redbooks Point-of-View publication Analytics, Cloud Still Dominant, but More Looms on IT Horizon.  that is available to download (http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp5177.html?Open)

The figure below has been extracted from the report and reports trends we considered as well as reveals the relationships among them. As subway or train map that can help acquaint a visitor to a new city and its neighborhoods, a similar diagram in the figure can illustrate how the top IT trends have changed since the survey began in 2012.

Trends are logically grouped into exploration trajectories that link related trends and reveal where new opportunities can arise in the future.

The black lines connect the critical areas of cloud, analytics, mobile, and security. The other lines indicate these trends:

• Red line: Trends tied to changing business models and user behaviors as a result of digital transformation.
• Yellow line: Trends related to increasing capabilities in artificial intelligence and analytics, which often
• accelerate those related to digital transformation (see where the red and yellow lines intersect).
• Blue line: Trends linking the digital and physical worlds, such the growing Internet of Things and proliferation of on-the-edge computing capabilities.
• Green line: Trends related to the transformation of IT itself to support the new, digitally transformed world.

It was a pleasure for me to work with Andrea and Rashik to produce this document but, at the same time, we need to thank a VERY long list of colleagues that worked or are currently working on the IBM AoT Technology program that has in change to build and update the IBM AoT technical agenda.

Enjoy the reading!