The next wave of innovation

According to reports the PC/tablet/Chromebook demand will weaken considerably in 2022, declining 9.3%. Gartner forecasts that 5G smartphones will reach 547 million shipments in 2022, up from 246 million shipments in 2021.

Forward-thinking CIOs are mapping out three-year plans that anticipates newly mainstreamed tech, blended teams, democratised IT, and there will be more emphasis on integration, orchestration, and business results. CIOs are constantly looking ahead to make sure we are ready for what’s next.

There are technology-enabled changes in how people work as well as general advancements in technologies like cloud, machine learning, and open source as trends are impacting the three-year roadmap. Hence, there is a need for agility in IT and ongoing training is essential for success in the years ahead.

To continue to grow value, leaders will need to and intend to extend their efforts into digital transformation. CIOs, analysts, and researchers predict that they will see maturation of the technologies they already have in place in the years ahead. CIOs are also saying that they expect some technologies that they are only watching or testing now to become mainstream by 2025.

Going forward, CIOs and researchers believe a robust cloud environment will be mandatory for capitalising on other technology trends expected to be in play in 2025. This includes a surge of interest in and use cases for augmented reality, virtual reality, and the metaverse. According to CIOs, even though the latter technology is currently far from prime-time ready, they see real enthusiasm for Web3 and the metaverse.

CIOs and IT advisors also expect the high growth rates of connected devices to continue over the next three years. The internet of things is going to continue to explode. Today we are already in the billions of connected devices, and are talking about trillions in the upcoming years. As a result, CIOs are plotting out what they will need to support, monitor, and secure the burgeoning endpoint infrastructure, which remains a question mark.

This means looking at the biometrics to replace passwords and even tokens for security, there are more edge computing devices to process data, more intelligence tools to understand the data being generated by the endpoint devices, and more automation to react to the data analysis.

This emphasis on data is a key facet of CIOs’ 2025 outlooks. They anticipate a tsunami of data — even greater than is experienced today — with data coming from not only the growing number of endpoint devices but also systems of record and other applications, which will only be increasing the amount of data they produce and collect.