Tech Market Davids vs. Goliaths, Wearables and the Future of IT

I hope you’ve been enjoying the summer and taking some time to recharge. Given some recent R&R myself, I came back to work with an assortment of thoughts and questions that floated up in my mind while I was relaxing on the beach.

Here are a few for your consideration:

• Who will emerge as winners in the battle of the IT market Goliaths and the startup Davids? It’s been remarkable to watch all the mergers and acquisitions in the tech market as the big players refashion themselves to recapture customer relevance. The big guys have powerful sales engines to drive scale but struggle to produce those innovative top-of-mind solutions CIOs want to buy. On the other side, highly targeted, nimble startups are doing some amazing work in cloud, social, mobile, big data and the enterprise consumer space. Yet they falter when it comes to distribution channels, scalability and support. Who will win out?
• Are wearables really the next big tech wave? If you attended the recent D11 conference or CITE Expo, you’d certainly believe wearable computers are well on their way. Could Google Glass become the new iPhone? (To me, it will come down to the apps, as it always does.)
• Lenovo entering the U.S. server, storage and mobile device markets strikes me as a bold move, given how Dell is going private, IBM is rumored to be selling off its low-end server line, and Oracle is still struggling to make money from its Sun acquisition. Are there sustainable profits still to be made in this category, or has hardware become just the wrapper for software?
• What will the IT organization look like in 5 years? Our sister publication, Computerworld, ran a piece in early June headlined “IT Departments Won’t Exist in Five Years” about an evolution toward a hybrid model of “tech consultants and integrators.” What do you think?

Finally, I’m really looking forward to our upcoming CIO 100 Symposium later this month (Aug. 11-13 in Colorado Springs), where we’ll welcome more than 300 CIOs and senior IT executives from the world’s top companies, including our 2013 CIO 100 award winners. Our theme this year is “Thriving in an Age of Disruptive Innovation.” Sounds right on target, doesn’t it? I hope to see you there.

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