Microsoft will begin to dominate new networking and technology areas by increasing its share of unified communication and voice over IP solutions. It is also expected to acquire online major Yahoo and increase its share of search engine traffic and online advertising.
Mobile devices and specifically smart phones will continue to play a larger part of consumer daily activity and are expected to become a major device category by 2015. Mobility solutions and applications will mature quickly and evolve to dominate our professional and personal life. Major services providers; customer facing organisations like banks, public sector, airlines, transportation; others will start rolling out their mobile applications. Mobile application developers will see an increasing demand in 2012.
Apple will become the world’s top PC vendor in 2012 due to its continuing success of the iPhone and iPad devices. The Android operating system will continue to dominate global mobile market share and will increase its penetration in the Middle East and Africa region. While social media is driving adoption and evolution of every possible intelligent device it will also be responsible for evolving contact centres into context based operations.
The adoption of mobile devices will increase exponentially in the enterprise segment. Mobile device management and mobile device security will be a major new technology to be rolled out in the enterprise and will witness a high rate of adoption. Investment in mobile device management and mobile security management is expected to grow by 46% globally and 200% across Middle East and Africa.
The ubiquitous Cloud computing will continue to gain attention throughout 2012 but adoption will be slow due to enterprise security concerns. However expansion of Cloud services will drive demand for data centre infrastructure and data centres will represent the biggest IT spending projects in 2012.
For the first time Smart TVs will begin to start growing in 2012, largely due to content providers beginning to start rolling out their services including online pay per view and on demand streaming services. As tablets improve their performance and form factors, market share of Netbooks will be cannibalized and will be eroded further.
Looking into 2012, here is a list of high probability events.
