Technology Trends 2012

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BY SANJAY [email protected]

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COVER STORY

SME CHANNELSDECEMBER 2011

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS 2012

Cover_Story.indd 26 20/12/11 9:14 PM

With the gradual fading of 2011, partners and SMEs are waiting for the forecasts and predictions about tech-nology trends for next year

by the major vendors so that they could wait and invest on the right technology. As per Gart-ner the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2012 will revolve around media tablets, mobile-centric applications and interfaces, contextual and social user experience, Internet of things, app stores and marketplaces, next-generation analytics, big data, in-memory computing, extreme low-energy servers and cloud comput-ing. Woven throughout that list are opportuni-ties that involve mobility, both on the front-end and back-end, and the incorporation of con-sumer mobile devices in the enterprise.

Similarly, Deloitte Consulting’s principal and CTO Mark White, says that Mobility, social, analytics, cloud and cyber are technology forces each impacting business today. The intersection of these represents an opportunity for new busi-ness technology value and innovation.

Truly mobile computing, social media, virtu-alization and cloud computing are going to be major base of technology in coming year and beyond.

As per Ajay Goel, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Symantec, “Among the various security incidents that made waves in 2011, it will go down as the year in which the founda-tion for the successor of the infamous Stuxnet was laid. It will also be remembered as the year the mobile malware movement began in real earnest. Finally, 2011 was undoubtedly the year of the targeted attack; with a concerning number of incidents involving compromised legitimate digital certificates.

Looking back on 2011 also gives us a per-

spective of what we can expect to see in 2012, including:

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) contin-ued to target industrial control-related organi-zations, while critical infrastructure protection program awareness and engagement waned.

A recent Symantec Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Survey found that companies are generally less engaged in their government’s CIP programs this year when compared to last. In fact, only 37 percent of companies are completely or significantly engaged in such pro-grams this year, versus 56 percent in 2010.

When combined with recent revelations around the Duqu threat whose purpose was to gather intelligence data and assets from organi-zations such as manufacturers of components commonly found in industrial control environ-ments, the findings of the CIP Survey are par-ticularly troubling. At this point in time, there is no reason to assume the attackers behind Duqu were unable to gather the intelligence they were looking for.

As the use of smart mobile devices has exploded, the risks surrounding them – particu-larly mobile malware and data loss – have also experienced unprecedented growth.

According to Gartner, sales of smartphones will exceed 461 million by end of the year, surpassing PC shipments in the process. This explosion has captured cybercriminals’ atten-tion and as a result, the year 2011 saw significant real growth in the amount of mobile malware. From malware seeking to embarrass victims to malware exploiting premium rate number billing, to malware focused on information theft, it’s undeniable that 2011 was the first year mobile malware presented a true threat to enterprises and consumers. The rise of the tablet has also presented concerns around the

The year 2012 is not very far from now. The tech providers and partners have already started getting ready for the realignment – at least at the mental level. It is very much for the reason that people should invest on latest and right technology.

AS PER GARTNER, THE TOP 10 STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY TRENDS FOR 2012 WILL REVOLVE AROUND MEDIA TABLETS, MOBILE-CENTRIC APPLICATIONS AND INTERFACES, CONTEXTUAL AND SOCIAL USER

EXPERIENCE, INTERNET OF THINGS, APP STORES AND MARKETPLACES, NEXT-GENERATION ANALYTICS, BIG DATA, IN-MEMORY COMPUTING,

EXTREME LOW-ENERGY SERVERS AND CLOUD COMPUTING.


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COVER STORYTECHNOLOGY TRENDS 2012


threat of well-meaning and malicious insiders that can fly under the radar of IT.

Cybercrime’s spread from the criminal underground to the business mainstream was highlighted by a surge in targeted attacks

Symantec’s November Intelligence Report shows that targeted attacks are becoming more prevalent in 2011. Large enterprises with more than 2,500 employees, received the greatest number of attacks, with 36.7 targeted attacks being blocked each day. By contrast, small-to-medium sized businesses, with less than 250 employees, had 11.6 targeted attacks blocked daily during the same period.

The increasing number of targeted attacks is being driven at least in part by competitive advantage as companies explore digital espio-nage to acquire sensitive, proprietary data from competitors.

High-profile hacks of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate providers and malware threats that misuse SSL certificates became an issue in 2011

Publicity and public ire about SSL-related breaches such as DigiNotar and Comodo reached an all-time high in 2011. Malware threats increasingly came from sources using SSL Certificates that cyber criminals either stole or fraudulently acquired.

As per Kaushal Veluri- Director, Channels & Alliances, India Subcontinent, Citrix, the key trend in 2012 will be BYO3, Workshift-ing and Desktop Virtualisation. Indian market will witness increase in tablet adoption, people adapting to workshifting and employee base demanding workshifting concept.

According to Citrix Improved information security drives 92 percent of desktop virtualiza-tion deployments. Ninety one percent of orga-nizations surveyed have implemented desktop virtualization or plan to do so before the end of 2013 according to new global research com-missioned by Citrix. Of those organizations, 92

percent are adopting desktop virtualization to improve information security.

Allowing employees to be more mobile instead of being locked in at an office location, to use their own device for computing, to use cloud based applications/services, using 3G wireless access will be a norm in many com-panies and technologies like Desktop Virtual-ization will enable companies to adopt these changes and enable mobile workstyles.

Syed Masroor-Head, TESCO,NetApp India predicts that there will be Scale Out of NAS besides other things.

According to IDC, non structured file- type data is increasing at the fastest rate and is pre-dicted to occupy 80% of the total storage capac-ity by 2012. Network Attached Storage (NAS) is the best option for storing non-structured data that maybe scattered throughout millions of files. Scale-out NAS marks a new trend in storage. The scale-up model is coming to an end, be it NAS or SAN, much in the same way CPU technology is evolving from frequency improvement to kernel enhancement. Scale- out NAS, though helping enterprise users to take on the challenges in surging demands for storing non-structured data with its scalability and manageability, has weaknesses in some functions such as snapshot management and restoration, remote duplication-based disaster tolerance, and multi-protocol support. Despite its weaknesses, scale-out NAS shall witness its users increasing constantly and its ability to deal with the explosive growth of data

Moving to One Wire Network convergence shall be a big trend for both storage and net-working segments. Network convergence is bringing together Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, IP and clustering into a single physical layer that can be shared and optimized to make the other trends we outlined here possible. Without the right network, none of the other trends would be changing the world. The move to one wire will happen in many phases, over a number of years, but it will happen, and 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) with the new Data Center Bridging (DCB) enhancements will be the key technol-ogy to enable network convergence.

The India Enterprise Storage market is evolv-ing and the momentum is shifting towards Ethernet in a big way. The underlying reason for this is a ten-fold increase in Ethernet speeds. We are seeing increased adoption of 10G in data centers, which will drive economies of scale. This in turn is catalysing the shift towards deployment of Ethernet Storage. Significant advances in Ethernet technology like 10 Gigabit and FCoE driven by key storage networking players have made this a promising option. It offers the speed and reliability of Fibre Channel at the cost of Ethernet.

NAS for Desktop Virtualization will gain further momentum in the year 2012 along with NAS for industry players like that of Oracle and Microsoft.

Rajiv Bhalla, Associate Vice President & Country Head, Sales & Marketing, NEC India Pvt. Ltd. says that the unified communication market in India is estimated at Rs. 6,000 crore for the year 2010-2011. The market grew by 35-40 percent; over last year. The UC market is

“WE WILL CONTINUE TO DEVELOP TECHNOLOGIES, SERVICES, AND SOFTWARE PLATFORMS THAT ENABLE OUR CUSTOMERS TO LEVERAGE THE NETWORK TO SOLVE THEIR GREATEST BUSINESS CHALLENGES.”B RAGHAVENDRAN, VICE- PRESIDENT AND HEAD PARTNER ORGANIZATION CISCO INDIA AND SAARC

“2011 WAS UNDOUBT-EDLY THE YEAR OF THE TARGETED ATTACK; WITH A CON-CERNING NUMBER OF INCIDENTS.”AJAY GOEL, MANAGING DIRECTOR, INDIA AND SAARC, SYMANTEC


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COVER STORY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS 2012


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moving into a significant phase where overall awareness and customer hand-holding is nec-essary. Greater UC effectiveness like reduced TCO, greater efficiencies and optimization of resources need to be validated through case studies. Among the verticals where we have seen and will see greater adoption of UC are: hospitality, SME & healthcare.

There has been a massive evolution and adaptability of unified communications in Hospitality segment of late. Hoteliers are effec-tively using unified communication solutions to improve their guest experience, reduce the total cost of ownership and provide access to their customers anytime, anywhere. With the influx of technology and sophisticated solutions, conventional sources of earning revenue have dwindled. With the intention of increasing rev-enue the hotels are looking at offering a bouquet of value added services like movie on demand, music downloads, interactive games which will entice the guest and also add revenue.

Companies today are aware of the potential that exists in the SME sector and are intro-ducing customized and cost effective com-munication solutions for small and medium enterprises. According to a survey by Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. India SMBs spent approximately $165 million on unified communications (UC) in 2010, with close to three fourths of all businesses deploying UC applications. Instant messaging applications are ubiquitous and hosted audio & web conferencing applications show significant usage among businesses having 10+ employees. Going forward, I foresee the SME sector to be big adopter of UC solutions.

Another lucrative vertical for UC is health-care. Healthcare is a communication intensive business. Good communication has a profound effect on the quality of delivery in healthcare

organization. Healthcare organizations are increasingly facing challenges – the ongoing pressures to improve operating margins while meeting the increasing demands for high-qual-ity patient care. Implementing a Unified Com-munications (UC) framework can address these concerns by providing solutions that improve collaboration between medical and adminis-trative staff, enabling faster and better decision making.

The overall UC market has matured and evolved significantly in 2011. The most notable change has been the shift in emphasis from broad UC portfolios toward fuller UC suites. UC is set to become all pervasive and is set to be a game changer in the way we communicate. Adoption of UC will come from unconventional verticals like SMEs, healthcare and hospitality. As the technology becomes more main stream its adoption is only going to increase.

Bobby Mon, Head-Enterprise Business, SMB, Dell India predicts of IT being the key enabler, consumerization of IT, mobility, cloud com-puting, storage, etc. will continue to grow and SMBs will bring the next wave of growth for our country.

IT is now being seen as a key enabler for almost all business activities - from sales and marketing to internal organizations, training and customer outreach - and is no more just about automating the back office. Also, most customers, especially the larger enterprises, will continue to look for vendors that offer a het-erogeneous approach and do not tie them into proprietary technology costs.

Today’s Virtual Era is best defined by the blurring of lines between consumer and com-mercial technology. People no longer differenti-ate between consumer electronics, computing and even entertainment industries – they just know they want seamless, always on connectiv-ity to their social networks and content. Con-sumerization is driving a new mindset – one of open collaboration and freedom with the blurring of work and home, emergence of new mobile devices and changing expectations of IT and their work experience.

There is a huge change underway in end user devices. We see the rapid adoption of mobile devices such as broadband-enabled handhelds, tablet PCs, laptops and other portable Internet endpoints creating new opportunities and challenges for Dell, our partners and custom-ers. This phenomenon is creating the first truly mobile workforce and virtual workplace, giving people the ability to work when and how they choose. We, on our part are investing heavily in these areas; not just devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. but in the systems manage-ment appliances, desktop virtualization, etc.

Given the focus on driving cost efficiencies, productivity and business growth, we will con-tinue to see technologies such as virtualization lead the way. Desktop virtualization would be critical in this aspect. As more and more medium and large-sized companies accelerate the need for dynamic and converged infrastruc-ture to support the business needs of next eco-

“AS WE ENTER 2012, TWO KEY AREAS THAT WOULD BE CRITICAL TO THE GROWTH OF BIG ENTER-PRISES AS WELL SME BUSINESSES ARE CLOUD COMPUTING AND MOVING INTO THE ERA OF BIG DATA.”RAJESH JANEY, PRESIDENT, INDIA AND SAARC, EMC CORPORATION

“CONSUMERIZATION OF IT, MOBILITY, CLOUD COMPUTING, STORAGE, ETC. WILL CONTINUE TO GROW AND SMBS WILL BRING THE NEXT WAVE OF GROWTH FOR OUR COUNTRY.”BOBBY MON, HEAD-ENTERPRISE BUSINESS, SMB, DELL INDIA


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nomic cycle, and look for optimized utilization of resources such as space, power & cooling and people, virtualization will help drive improved ROI and efficiency.

Cloud computing is at a tipping point and we see it as a big opportunity for growing businesses to keep up with their growth without having to invest in and manage their infrastructure. IDC predicts cloud computing will capture 25% of IT spending by the year 2012, For the Indian market conditions, this is the right time to offer such services to ease infrastructure manage-ment leveraging the cloud. Factors that can trigger this model include companies looking for optimizing resources and reducing capital expenditure. Secondly, this model will be great help to companies who do not have mature IT teams and skilled manpower.

Storage, especially for SMBs, is more impor-tant than ever. Data is growing at exponential rates, with IDC projecting a 60% growth rate in the digital universe this year, or nearly 1.8 zettabytes of data by the end of the year. That’s a 10-fold increase over the past five years. Today, there’s still a need to secure data but there’s also a demand for data to be shared so that remote workers, partners, customers and even mobile applications have several access points, anytime, anywhere. We believe the future, especially for SMBs, lies in Ethernet-based storage technolo-gies largely because of Ethernet’s ubiquity, cus-tomers’ understanding of TCP/IP, lower total cost of ownership and the benefits of Ethernet when dealing with virtualization. For IT profes-sionals, that means faster and safer configura-tion and monitoring, a single pane of glass for management, lower operational expenses due to a lesser need for training, and a storage offer-ing that scales to meet the growing number of virtual machines.

SMBs will bring the next wave of growth for our country. SMBs cross a wildly diverse mish-mash of industries, sizes, and offerings, each with its own unique objectives and visions – but they share the desire to succeed; the challenge is to make their IT a true contributor to that success.

Rajesh Janey, President, India and SAARC, EMC Corporation, says, “As we enter 2012, two key areas that would be critical to the growth of big enterprises as well SME businesses are Cloud computing and moving into the era of Big Data.”

As per a study in 2011 by EMC-Zinnov Con-sulting, there is an increased preference of cloud adoption over the next five years in India. The total cloud market in India, currently at US$ 400 million will reach a market value of US$ 4.5 bil-lion by 2015; of which private cloud adoption will dominate and account for US$ 3.5 billion in rev-enues, growing at over 60 percent. The study also highlights that private cloud market will create 1 lakh jobs by 2015 from 10,000 today – an oppor-tunity for students and the workforce – compa-nies today are under-skilled in addressing cloud computing implementations in India. Though much of the industry is yet to adopt the cloud but due to implementation simplicity and cost saving purpose cloud is going to be the game changer for Indian IT. However EMC believes cloud is not only about cost saving and implementation simplicity but also a new source of revenue gen-eration. The revenue generation can be achieved through adopting the IT as a Service model.

Digital data is now everywhere – in every sector, in every economy, in every organization and user of digital technology. While this topic might once have concerned only the data geeks, Big Data is now relevant to leaders across every sector, and consumers of products and services stand to benefit from its application. The ability to store, aggregate, and combine data and then use the results to perform deep analyses have become even more accessible. In a nutshell, the premise behind big data is scarily simple. Many of the newer IT-based value propositions are being built around gathering and leveraging vast amounts of information. More data, more value and it’s a trend to watch out for in 2012.

The discussion on Big Data is at a prelimi-nary stage with CIOs and IT Managers today, and the tempo is picking up real fast. Reason for this is that CIOs are faced with enormous amount of important data sets and are turning to mine them for insights for business value. There is a lot of exponentially more raw infor-mation available to gather and harvest. Also, most enterprises are contemplating to virtualize and move to the cloud at some point. All this requires a pre-determined plan of moving large data assets, securing them and a plan to drive analytics. Verticals that have been traditionally heavy consumer-centric and IT-savvy, such as retail, BFSI, or others which process significant amounts of information such as Oil & Gas and Healthcare for example are turning to apply-ing existing data for business insight. While a market estimate is difficult to predict right now, it is clear that large enterprises who have gigan-tic portions of digital data are actively consider-ing Big Data analytics.

“THE KEY TREND IN 2012 WILL BE BYO3, WORKSHIFT-ING AND DESKTOP VIRTU-ALISATION. INDIAN MARKET WILL WITNESS INCREASE IN TABLET ADOPTION, PEOPLE ADAPTING TO WORKSHIFT-ING AND EMPLOYEE BASE DEMANDING WORKSHIFT-ING CONCEPT.”KAUSHAL VELURI, DIRECTOR, CHANNELS & ALLIANCES, INDIA SUBCONTINENT, CITRIX

“MOVING TO ONE WIRE NETWORK CONVER-GENCE SHALL BE A BIG TREND FOR BOTH STORAGE AND NET-WORKING SEGMENTS.”SYED MASROOR, HEAD, TESCO, NETAPP INDIA


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Another factor that will fuel the need for Big Data is the ever-increasing growth of digital data. An IDC-EMC study determined that India generated nearly 40,000 petabytes of data in 2010. The report also revealed that over the next decade (2010 to 2020), digital information in India will grow twice as fast as the world-wide rate driven by the roll-out of 3G/BWA networks, digitization of television networks, and increased technology adoption among indi-viduals, SMBs, enterprises and in Government services like the Unique ID project, Census, among others.

Cisco is the leader in the networking space and recently they have come into computing space with their data centre and cloud comput-ing offering. B Raghavendran Vice- President and Head Partner Organization Cisco India and SAARC, says, “As the network increasingly becomes the platform for delivering a plethora of services, we have seen a big jump in Inter-net traffic. Additionally, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, increased traction in cloud services and virtualization as well as the growing popularity of IP voice and video have all resulted in the amount of data traffic increasing manifold. As the role of the network transforms, it is becoming central to establish-ing connections between people, devices, and information.”

Some of the top trends that Cisco foresees in Networking in 2012 are as follows:n Device and content agnosticism: The

network will unify wireless and wired access to support the proliferation of devices (“bring your own device”, or BYOD) and ubiquitous mobil-ity. Virtualization and cloud services will deliver content whenever they provide a lower cost of ownership.n Increased collaboration with customers,

staff, suppliers and other partners will grow, using video, data, and voice communications

on a variety of devices. There will be increased emphasis on the ability to quickly and easily collaborate no matter where people are will transform business processes. Video will be the cornerstone of collaboration, for a range of applications from social networking to smart connected communities. n Network security will gain prominence as

the amount of data increases. We will see con-

vergence of elements such as firewalls, content security, and policy and identity management. As a result, seamless connections and context-aware security that recognizes who you are, what you’re supposed to have access to, what device you’re on, and where you are globally, and then provides access accordingly. Addition-ally, IP based physical safety and security will also continue to gain prominence.n As the global population heads towards

7 billion, governments and urban planners are looking for smarter ways to use available resources to deliver more with less. Informa-tion technology is an important enabler of a more sustainable approach to designing, build-ing, and operating cities. Smart and connected communities are no longer just a vision but will increasingly become a reality.n Network technology architecture will

connect any device across any combination of networks, increase cost efficiency by integrat-ing network security and management, and improve business processes, including energy management. Architecture virtualization scales up the efficiency power of the IT infrastructure significantly and enhances the performance of the increasingly complex and consolidated systems. n Data Centre consolidation will become

important to ensure optimal utilization of exist-ing resources and assets. Virtualization will play a big role in the near future as IT organizations morph into more and more of a services man-agement framework.n The transition from Internet Protocol ver-

sion 4 (IPv4) to IP version 6 (IPv6) will continue to gain momentum. The use of globally unique IPv6 addresses simplifies the mechanisms used for reachability and end-to-end security for network devices, functionality that is crucial to the applications and services that are driving the demand for the addresses.n 802.11n wireless networks will continue

to see an increase in adoption with the ability to create a seamless working environment by combining the mobility of wireless with the per-formance of wired networks.

Fiscal 2011 was one of the most transforma-tive years we have seen at Cisco. We prioritized, simplified, and took action to drive Cisco’s continued market leadership. We believe the network will continue to grow in importance and could become our customers’ most strate-gic information technology (IT) asset. We will continue to develop technologies, services, and software platforms that enable our customers to leverage the network to solve their greatest busi-ness challenges.

“AMONG THE VERTICALS WHERE WE HAVE SEEN AND WILL SEE GREATER ADOP-TION OF UC ARE: HOSPITAL-ITY, SME & HEALTHCARE.”RAJIV BHALLA, ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT & COUNTRY HEAD, SALES & MARKETING, NEC INDIA PVT. LTD.

“THE CHALLENGE FOR STORAGE TECHNOL-OGY LIES IN KEEPING PACE WITH INFLATING CAPACITY REQUIRE-MENTS WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON THE EFFICIENCY.” KHALID WANI,SALES DIRECTOR - BRANDED BUSI-NESS FOR INDIA, MIDDLE EAST, AND AFRICA, WD


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As a graphics platform leader AMD expects a lot of changing trends in the industry. As per Raghuram Pattabiraman, Director - Transac-tion Business, AMD India, Microsoft DirectX 11 is the latest in high-speed, high-fidelity gaming and computing and features technolo-gies like Compute Shaders, Direct2D, Multi-threaded Rendering and Tessellation. DirectX 11 can enable not just more visually stunning games, but significant performance improve-ments when it comes to browsing websites and everyday applications. As users need a graphics card which gives complete support, perfor-mance and enhanced image quality for DX11, this surely will be one trend to watch out for. So the technology like AMD Eyefinity technology, AMD HD3D technology, AMD App Accelera-tion and AMD CrossFireX technology are going to largely influence the multimedia industry.

Very recently, due to the natural disaster in Thailand, HDD market had received a strong hit. Even today, the vendors as well as the partners are not able to get out of that impact. Khalid Wani, WD’s sales director - branded business for India, Middle East, and Africa, says, “The quantity of digital information is doubling every two years. The challenge for storage technology lies in keeping pace with inflating capacity requirements without com-promising on the efficiency and cost-effective-ness of storage peripherals.”

Fortunately, computer storage technology is evolving with hard disk drives (HDDs) at its core. Storage vendors are working together to pre-empt tomorrow’s storage requirements and standards. New possibilities are being discov-ered and evaluated everyday to deliver innova-tive products that will address the tomorrow’s storage demands.

Industry analysts anticipate that the digital universe will grow to about 1.8 trillion giga-bytes of data in 500 quadrillion ‘files’ this year. Interestingly, only about 25% of this data will be generic – the rest will consist of redundant copies! This information is contained in IDC’s report titled ‘Extracting Value from Chaos,’ on the exponential growth of the digital universe.

To paint a clearer picture, it states that about 57.5 billion 32 Gb iPads are required to store 1.8 ZB of data. Or, 200 billion high definition movies, each 120 minutes long, and it would take one person 47 million years of viewing around the clock to watch every movie.

The paper goes on to reveal that notwith-standing a global economic recession in 2010, the digital universe set a new record by break-ing the ZB barrier. By 2020, it will be at least 44 times its current size.

So now that electronic data is set to exceed the 2 ZB barrier let’s take a look at the factors that are driving the demand. Let me point out first, that ‘shadowing technology’ has contributed more to the demand than actual user-generated content.

Digital lifestyles, streaming and personal content creation for home entertainment, Social Media, cell phones, security and surveillance applications, and finally Cloud Computing are going to push the erstwhile boundaries of data storage more than ever.

As highlighted earlier, Redundancy of stored data is responsible for a large portion of the demand. For instance, anything stored on a smartphone or tablet is either duplicated or backed up elsewhere. Enterprises are increas-ingly embracing the Cloud for storage and ser-vices. Critical data store on the Cloud is backed up several times in multiple datacenters across locations. Clearly, the enterprises’ need for stor-age and secure backup is only going to increase.

Social platforms such as Twitter or Facebook

“AS USERS NEED A GRAPHICS CARD WHICH GIVES COM-PLETE SUPPORT, PERFORMANCE AND ENHANCED IMAGE QUALITY FOR DX11, THIS SURELY WILL BE ONE TREND TO WATCH OUT FOR.”RAGHURAM PATTABIRAMAN, DIRECTOR - TRANSACTION BUSINESS, AMD INDIA

backup users’ data at least 3 times. Data is cre-ated around online transactions and purchases, and continuously updated streams of analysis are stored, directed and accessed in the vortex.

As capacity and density requirements spiral upwards, storage companies face barriers with current technical standards. For SSDs, as NAND Flash reaches semiconductor limits for lithographies below 1X nanometers, new technologies such as vertical NAND or 3D stackable NAND are striving to extend NAND Flash technology. Other technologies contend-ing to succeed NAND are: 3D resistive RAM, phase change memory (PCM) and spin-transfer torque magneto-resistive RAM.

Hard drives presently hover at maximum capacities of 3 terabytes in the 3.5 inch form factor. Current magnetic drives employ per-pendicular magnetic recording (PMR). Since PMR began shipping in 2005, storage densities have increased as much as eight times from the previous standard, longitudinal recording. Thereafter, improvements in Areal Density have enabled disk capacities to meet demands.

However, PMR is reaching its limit. An interim answer may be shingle magnetic recording (SMR) technology. Like shingle tiles layered on a roof, SMR writes partially overlap-ping data tracks in a particular direction, radi-ally to increase a drive’s areal density, getting more tracks on disk platter surfaces. It provides a 20 – 50% increase over conventional record-ing. An ideal fit for selective functions such as archive data storage, SMR will likely remain as a technology option in combination with other enablers on a forward basis.

Another technology under investigation is that of bit-patterned media (BPM) which involves pre-defining the size and position of bits in the recording medium and is expected to increase storage density on HDDs to 10 terabits or more per square inch when used in conjunc-tion with EAMR.

Anticipated to come to market in 5 to 7 years, BPM records individual bits on lithographed islands of strongly-coupled magnetic material which retain each bit’s magnetic charge, thereby allowing the bits to be far smaller than would otherwise be possible with continuous media. Speed-bumps to BPM’s implementation are sig-nificant cost and fabrication concerns.

Finally...Overall, there will be evolution in all technology space but the enteprise applciations will largely revolve arround cloud computing, virtualiza-tion and mobility. Tablets will play a major role in enterprise and cosnumers life.


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