2013 IT trends: Big data, mobility, social networking, cloud computing

Cloud computing includes three levels of service: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and Software as a service (SaaS). When software as a service is gradually being accepted and mainstreamed, the focus of cloud computing begins to shift to the platform, the service. Microsoft, for example, is trying to shift Windows Azure from platform to service to infrastructure. Last year, a virtual machine with a persistent state was attached to the original base to support Azure, enabling it to adapt to a wider range of software (including Linux). Amazon's Web services architecture, however, blurs the boundaries between the platform, the service and the infrastructure, the services. The Salesforce.com website hopes to develop PAAs through its own website platform to develop a variety of SaaS. In addition to Customer relationship management (CRM) and Human resources management (HR) cloud applications, financial applications for small and midsize enterprises, such as adaptive planning, host analysis, and so on, have emerged.

In large data areas, emphasis will be shifted to analysis and data visualization issues. Other major trends are capturing and analyzing data for quick decision making. The era of post Hadoop has begun, and more and more cloud services companies are beginning to provide real-time data processing and analysis, and are still showing an increasing trend. Similar to IBM's relational data management system DB2 and Oracle's relational database, due to the development of more mature and strong durability and reliability, will occupy the dominant position in enterprise application. However, the growing size of data requires new solutions.

Mobility should be attributed to the huge growth in tablet sales. Last year, tablet sales surpassed Lenovo's personal laptop. Cloud computing uses device users as a tablet, Android smartphone user, and Apple has more than 700,000 iphone apps. Looking to the future, each enterprise will design its own proprietary UI and mobile applications.

Social networks already have a large number of users, and businesses are trying to find the right way to get the most out of their business interests. In fact, society is rapidly becoming involved. The head of communications can test the company's social networking site for customers ' complaints and praise of the company, as well as the renewal and social capabilities of enterprise applications. Therefore, enterprise applications will integrate more social functions.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)