Forrester's 15 Emerging Tech Trends Highlight Infrastructure Platforms

Mobile, social, data and cloud? These four mega-trends have been driving innovation in tech for the past decade and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We know you’re aware of these. But research firm Forrester shared a peek into its analysts’ crystal ball in the form of a blog post that pinpoints fifteen emerging (and growing!) tech trends born of the four biggies.

Looking ahead five years, Forrester analysts highlight four main subcategories: 1) infrastructure and application platforms; 2) process data management; 3) sensors and remote computing; and 4) end user computing.

Forrester listed five specific technologies under the infrastructure and application platforms rubric. They include:

• Big data platforms
• Breakthrough storage and compute
• Software defined infrastructure
• Cloud application frameworks
• New identity and trust models

From our perspective, it is the last category--identity and trust models--that carries with it the most potential, and the most need, for innovation.

Under the process data management technologies list, Forrester name checks these four sleeper trends:

• Smart process applications and semantics
• Advanced analytics
• Pervasive business intelligence
• Process and data cloud services

We weren’t sure what exactly Forrester meant by “smart process applications”--but here’s their definition: “a new category of business application software designed to support processes that are people-intensive, highly-variable, loosely structured, and subject to frequent change.” Frequent change? Well, at least that’s something everyone in enterprise IT is used to.

To read the rest of Forrester’s list of fifteen emerging trends, check out the blog post here.

Rachel Rosmarin's technology reporting experience goes back a decade to the dawn of Wi-Fi, smartphones and the Mp3. She has an in-depth knowledge of consumer electronics and has cultivated her love of useful new toys and innovative social software at publications including Tom’s Guide, Forbes, Business 2.0, Sound & Vision and Mobile Magazine. She holds degrees in Journalism and Science In Human Culture from Northwestern University and is based in Los Angeles.

See here for all of Rachel's Tom's IT Pro articles.

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