In the Bimodal model we find two areas of IT – the traditional kind where the main concern is keeping the lights on and the IT focusing on agility and speed, where everything needs to be faster.

Today companies are investing in new technologies and processes to emulate their most agile competitors. Gone are the days of waterfall development and releases only every few months. Today’s IT and the business it powers demands performance akin to a supercar – everything needs to be faster, every screw is tuned over and over again to gain maximum speed and agility; to edge out competitors. With new technologies and approaches come new software packages, technologies and processes.

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I just completed a video that accompanies my latest research on mobile consumer behaviors, and the strategies retailers must implement. If you design, develop or deploy customer facing apps, this content is relevant and important.

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All eyes appeared to be on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in Las Vegas since last week, as more than 3,600 companies unveiled the IoT and IIoT innovations we can all expect to see in the coming year. This year’s CES showcased plans to make the car a complete mobile office-with technology in place to allow Skype calls and the use of Microsoft 365 from the car. The other hot theme at CES was drones – not a surprise since these unmanned crafts have pulled us in like a tracker-beam to the mother ship. The autonomous ‘copter drone was one of the most impressive releases with the reality that the businessman of tomorrow doesn’t need a private jet, just a ‘copter drone and a smart phone.

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With another year coming to a close, it’s time to dust off the crystal ball for our annual predictions. However, before we forecast any new insights, I want to look back at our 2015 predictions, which could be best summarized as a maturing of technology innovations introduced in prior years. Now that the fundamentals are in place, there’s potential for significant shifts in both software and vendor shakeups in 2016. The emerging battleground of innovation continues to heat up between companies that make technology versus those that use it. Success will be determined by a company’s ability to leverage and monetize its data and API assets, drive contextual interactions with customers, along with its organizational agility to react to competitive forces. Here is Part One of our 2016 predictions.

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It may be strange to hear, but Hong Kong has fallen behind much of the rest of the world when it comes to adopting cloud computing.

Hong Kong is well known for being an enormous financial hub for south-east Asia and one of the busiest centres of economic activity in the world, so to think that they’re lacking on the technological front would seem out of character. And yet, that’s exactly the case.

In many ways, Hong Kong is playing a version of “cloud catch up” with the rest of the world, with reports and surveys showing that there’s a general reluctance among businesses to make the cloud part of their operations. Despite this, there are other factors within Hong Kong that are pushing more cloud solutions, to the point where we may only be a few years away from Hong Kong truly catching up with what others are doing.

The hesitation shown by businesses in Hong Kong is actually reminiscent of the worries many business leaders expressed about the cloud several years ago. While not necessarily a new technology, the cloud was quickly gaining steam, and organisations wanted to know if it was the right fit for them. The usual issues were brought up, most of them pertaining to security.

Once businesses became more familiar with the cloud, and once cloud providers addressed the worries, adoption skyrocketed, to the point where it’s hard to imagine doing business without cloud computing at all. Businesses in Hong Kong are facing the same challenges. Many of the top executives indicate they are worried about cloud security, while others say it’s more a question about the legal restrictions dealing with the cloud.

Other factors also play a role in the lack of cloud adoption, factors that aren’t as prevalent in other areas of the world. As mentioned above, the finance industry in Hong Kong is especially large and influential. But by its very nature, financial institutions don’t like taking on risk. For many years, the cloud was seen as a risky manoeuvre, so many financial companies chose to stay away from it. That same thinking still holds sway in Hong Kong, though that is changing by degrees. Hong Kong CIOs have also expressed less interest in cloud. A recent survey from Gartner shows that CIOs rank cloud computing as a low priority, especially when compared to nearby regions like India, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Again, overcoming these obstacles requires a change in mindset, one that is certainly happening, though it lags behind other parts of the globe.

Another reason for poor cloud adoption is the lack of availability of cloud services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading public cloud provider in the world, but for the longest time it hadn’t spread to Hong Kong. AWS now considers Hong Kong to be what is referred to as an “edge location”, which is a definite improvement, but more work needs to be done. Luckily, it appears that provider proliferation is happening in the area. Public cloud providers like Amazon are turning their attention to the international market, with major in-roads being made in India, China, and Southeast Asia. Microsoft has partnered up with Hong Kong tech companies to provide the cloud version of its Office software. Google Cloud Platform is making strategic moves in the area as well. That’s not to mention Alibaba’s recent opening of its first data centre in Hong Kong.

It’s clear that cloud providers see the value of moving into Hong Kong and are implementing plans that will see it grow over the next few years. This is aided by legal reforms and the cooperation of Hong Kong companies.

The future of cloud computing in Hong Kong is certainly a bright one. According to research from IDC, the amount of money spent on cloud services in Hong Kong is expected to reach nearly $700 million by 2017. Companies see the opportunity and their getting on board with the idea. In a few years, it may even seem strange that we ever thought of Hong Kong being so far behind in the cloud. Whatever happens, it’s almost a sure thing that the cloud will prosper in the region, and with it, the companies that take advantage of the solutions it provides.

(c)iStock.com/BrianAJackson

Global cloud IT infrastructure, incorporating public and private, hit $7.6 billion (£5.32bn) in the third quarter of 2015, according to a research note from IDC.

HP, with a 15.7% market share in 3Q15 and revenue of $1.18bn, remains the top dog in cloud infrastructure according to the researchers, gaining in share from the previous year (15.0%). Dell and Cisco are in joint second place – the result of two vendors being less than one statistical point apart –  with revenues of $783m and $731 and market share of 10.4% and 9.7%.

It was a similar story in the battle for fifth place, with NetApp, IBM, and Lenovo all too close to be separated, and EMC on its own in fourth. The big winner over the past year was Lenovo, with an almost 750% revenue gain, while IBM was the major faller, dropping 42% in revenue year over year. All the other vendors, aside from NetApp, posted positive yearly change.

Cloud as the basis for overall IT infrastructure continues to rise, with more than a third (33.8%) of cloud infrastructure sales in 3Q15 compared to 28.7% a year ago. Revenue in traditional, non-cloud infrastructure declined by 3.2% year on year, as well as in each segment – server, storage, and Ethernet switch. On a regional basis, Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – was the fastest growing market at 35.3% year over year, well ahead of Western Europe (22.1%). In terms of individual countries, Japan (47.1%) was the fastest grower ahead of Canada (22.0%) and the US (20.1%).

“IDC continues to see healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments in the market with an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing hardware and platforms. “Customers are modernising their infrastructures, having a progressively larger number of viable options for cloud deployments either on or off premises.

“As public cloud offerings continue to evolve and improve in reliability and security, customers are becoming more comfortable with the flexibility that they get by deploying certain workloads in these elastic environments,” Stolarski added.

I recently spotted a five-year-old blog post by Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, where he suggests firing your quality assurance (QA) team to improve your quality. He got the idea from a client who actually tried and succeeded with this counterintuitive move.
The thinking goes that without a QA team to cover for them, developers are more likely to take care of quality properly – or risk getting the dreaded Sunday morning wakeup call to fix something.

Gualtieri’s post generated modest buzz at the time, but since 2011 the world has changed. DevOps has turned a corner, representing an end-to-end rethink of how organizations handle the entire software development lifecycle.

Now that 2016 has finally arrived, it’s time to take a fresh look at the question. But why stop with QA? Now that we have DevOps – and digital transformation more broadly – whom else can we fire?

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Most of the Java developers I know don’t like JavaScript. Initially. They would give you different reasons why, but the real one is simple: too much to learn to make it work. For many Java developers creating the front end of a Web application in JavaScript is a chore to write and a burden to maintain. Nevertheless JavaScript rules in Web development and the new version of JavaScript (ES6) will make it even more popular.

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