Business Technology Roundtable

Senior executives have been waiting for actionable insight from the mass of information that their IT departments already gather about their customers. But many have become very impatient -- because they want to see results, now. Do you anticipate that data analytics and real-time visualization will advance next year? Ovum expects a significant wave of business technology ramp-ups in 2014, in response to the market demand . They predict a growing third-party vendor and IT services ecosystem that creates Big Data and Fast Data tools and solutions for the enterprise data warehousing and applications markets. This growing trend is occurring as SQL and Hadoop platforms are diversifying, adopting multiple personalities, and providing overlapping functions. According to Ovum’s latest market study, SQL queries can now be run against Hadoop, and many SQL databases will be able to handle JSON document-centric queries. And as silicon-based storage -- DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and

Are you likely to increase your business technology investment next year? If you are, then you're not alone. Worldwide ICT spending is expected to accelerate in 2014, after dipping to its slowest pace of growth since the financial crisis in 2013, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation ( IDC ). Overall business technology spending is on course to increase by 4 percent this year at constant currency, reaching $2.04 trillion -- that's down from last year’s growth of 5 percent, due mainly to the slowdown in key emerging markets including China and Russia. IDC forecasts that in 2014, a rebound in China and continued momentum in the U.S. and Europe will see a return to overall industry growth of more than 5 percent (reaching $2.14 trillion). The Business Technology That Will Drive Growth In fact, almost half of this year’s industry growth is due to continued strength in smartphone and tablet shipments. Excluding mobile phones, IT spending will

Given the differences in market maturity, cultural acceptance and local IT infrastructures, considerable regional differences exist in the deployment rates of cloud-based security systems. They all play a part in the level of spending dedicated to this delivery model -- when compared with on-premises business technology deployments. Moreover, privacy remains an inhibitor in the deployment of all forms of cloud-based services by the late adopter market segment. In particular, it's a big issue in those regions and countries with strong regulatory requirements -- such as Europe, with its data protection legislation. Regardless, the cloud-based security services market will be worth $2.1 billion in 2013 -- growing to $3.1 billion in 2015, according to the latest market study by Gartner. "The cloud-based security market remains a viable one, offering providers many opportunities for expansion," said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner . "Encryption will be