Intergence reveals five IT trends for 2013

Peter Job, Founder and CEO of Intergence, describes the five trends that he believes will take off in 2013.

Intergence Trend 1. End User Experience analysis
The End User Experience (UX) is fast becoming a more important performance indicator for businesses than analysing metrics, measurements or other key performance indicators. Although subjective and liable to change, user experience is all about how users perceive the performance of an application or service they are using.

'Cold' metrics such as delay, jitter and loss are symptomatic of user performance issues, but do not tell the whole story. It could be described as the difference between gut feeling and facts and figures. Employees with good user experience of their business applications will be much more productive than those who have a poor user experience.

Intergence Trend 2. Application control
As the corporate WAN becomes an ever increasing battleground for bandwidth between applications, there is a pressing need to ensure that business critical applications - such as a bank's transaction processing system, a customer service helpline or an airline's booking system - are protected from non-business critical, bandwidth-hungry applications.

Increasingly, application performance profiles will be introduced to satisfy an organisation's security policy requirements and to reflect the needs of the users.

Intergence Trend 3. Application acceleration
There are situations where bandwidth alone cannot improve application performance and latency becomes a key bottleneck on even the largest of links.

Many existing application protocols, such as those which govern the FTP of large files between corporate networks, are not optimised for deployment across the WAN, hence it can be highly effective to optimise these applications for transmission across high latency links with long delays to improve performance.

Intergence Trend 4. Cloud-based optimisation
With more businesses requiring that their services be accessible anywhere, CIOs are increasingly looking towards cloud based solutions, including Software as a Service (SaaS), to provide the performance, scalability and accessibility many users demand.

This really drives the 'office anywhere' concept allowing users to be truly mobile, taking their office with them anywhere they have access to the Internet.

Users from around the world can work collaboratively and efficiently on a single task through via central service portal without the need to be in the same room together.

Intergence Trend 5. Data Centre consolidation
To improve efficiency, reduce operational costs and optimise application flows, many companies are now actively consolidating their Data Centres, where they once were promoting the growth of new ones. Companies may find themselves with three or four data centres through acquisitions that add new domains to their network and they may decide it's easier in the short-term to leave them operational.

Every individual data centre has to be staffed with facilities engineers, computer operators, system administrators and other specialists, while excess capacity has to be maintained to handle spikes in demand. All of these factors add to costs and inefficiencies.