It’s been a busy few weeks! Since the middle of October, I have attended the Boston EMC Forum, represented EMC Customer Support at a customer meeting in Texas, and traveled to several different parts of the US. The news is the same everywhere, and the message is clear – you need to get “smart” about your business.

What does that mean, exactly? Current industry trends show that the electronics industry – not just IT – is moving at break-neck speed toward “smart” technology (e.g. smartphones, handhelds, tablets) and that these items are being used as business tools more than ever. A recent article in the WSJ highlights this shift, noting that HTC is expecting Q4 revenue growth of 20-30 percent from a year earlier and has forecast shipments of its smartphones to pick up 31-42 percent as consumers move away from traditional cell phones.

Additionally, Frank Hauck of VCE recently commented at the EMC Forum that of the 60 billion SMS messages sent each day, a staggering 40 percent are business related. That is a cultural shift of seismic proportions.

The importance of mobility and data availability will only continue to grow, especially in enterprise IT. These customers are already demanding precise and up-to-date (i.e. realtime) data, accessible through any device they prefer to use. Traditional IT and outdated business processes are rapidly becoming the inhibitor to working “smartly.”

I had previously posted that digital information creation will increase 44x in the next decade. At the EMC Forum, Pat Gelsinger suggested that 90 percent of this data will be unstructured and that during the same time period, IT staffing will increase by less than 50 percent. The big question is: Are you prepared to face the explosion of data and the increasing need to make it mobile and available?

No matter what, the “smart” money is on breaking the traditional way of thinking. IT-as-a-Service will soon become the norm – mobility is just the start.

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