Prepare for the future, Gartner advises

Consumerisation, virtualisation and community collaboration are among eight trends set to revolutionise enterprise IT in the next 10 years,  Gartner is predicting.

The trends are commoditisation, consumerisation, tera-architectures, virtualisation, community, collaboration, new acquisition strategies and delivery models.

The analyst believes these trends will lead to a fundamental change in relations between big business and consumers.

Steve Prentice, Gartner's chief of research, says business and society are in the middle of a 60 year journey from analogue to digital that started with the PC.

'The first 30 years have been about driving technology into the enterprise. The next 30 years will see technology reaching every individual, in every part of society and will in turn have a huge impact on the way businesses operate,' he said.

Gartner's analysts made the predictions as part of its 10 year scenario report for IT, business and society.

Businesses need to be increasingly agile to deal with the changes occurring, but many are shackled by legacy IT system that are inflexible and leave them vulnerable to entrepreneurial market newcomers, the scenario document warns.

The challenge to established companies comes not from other established players, but from start-up entrepreneurs who will use technology to upset the status quo, Prentice says.

'The dot com threat may have been a mirage, but transformational business models enabled by Internet era IT are not,' he said.