The rise of the 3rd Platform

Research firm IDC recently shared the top 10 market predictions for 2014, focusing on the 3rd Platform in its IDC 2014 Predictions: CIO Agenda - Embracing 3rd Platform Leadership Challenges as IT Transitions from Technology to Service Delivery webinar. But what is this '3rd Platform' all about?

You might have heard of it by other names. Over 2013, and indeed even in 2012, vendors and analysts have been highlighting the same few trends that will impact all businesses: the rising use of mobile devices, increasingly popular cloud services, social technologies that have become more and more common, and "big data", or rather the potentially valuable business insights that can be afforded by the large volumes of data that are collected about customers by businesses today.

Of IDC's top 10 predictions for 2014, #2 is about big data; #3 refers to the cloud, social networking is covered by #5, while #4 and #5 are about mobility. The transformation that businesses need to make to realise benefits from this 3rd Platform are covered by #6, #8 and #10. A full 70% of the 2014 predictions are thus about the 3rd Platform - a definite hint to look closely at these trends and to see how they can be put into practice in a business.

In contrast, IDC's top 10 predictions for 2013 referred to the 3rd Platform twice (#1 and #9), centred around mobility for #3, #4 and #5, on cloud for #6 and #7 and on big data in #10, eight out of 10 predictions in total.
 
IDC's top 10 predictions for 2014 are:

1: In two years, over 70% of CIOs will change their primary role from directly managing IT to become an innovation partner
2: Before 2017, only 40% of CIOs will rise to produce business enhancing insights from big data and analytics
3: 70% of CIOs will increase enterprise exposure to risk to accelerate business agility through increased cloud adoption
4: Enterprise business mobility will require 60% of CIOs by 2017 to support an agile architecture with next-generation mobile applications
5: The demographic shift to young and mobile customers will require 80% of CIOs in consumer-facing businesses to integrate IT with public social networks by 2015
6: By 2015, 3rd Platform requirements will drive 60% of CIOs to use enterprise architecture (EA) as a required IT tool, but only 40% will deploy EA effectively.
7: By 2015, 60% of CIO security budgets for increasingly vulnerable legacy systems will be 30-40% too small to fund enterprise threat assessments
8: By 2017, the transfer of 3rd Platform investments from IT to line-of-business budgets will require 60% of CIOs to focus the IT budget on business innovation and value
9: By 2016, 80% of the IT budget will be based on providing broad portfolio of IT and business services
10: By 2018, adoption of 3rd Platform IT technologies will redefine 90% of IT roles
 
For comparison, IDC's predictions for 2013 were:

1: Worldwide, 2013 spending will exceed US$2.1 trillion, up 5.7% from 2012, driven by double-digit growth in the 3rd Platform foundations of mobile, cloud, big data, and social technologies—and by emerging markets' growth
2: IT spending will grow by 8.8% to over US$730 billion in emerging markets
3: Sales of smart mobile devices (termed SMDs by IDC)—smartphones and tablets—will grow by 20%, generate 20% of all IT sales, and drive 57% of all IT market growth
4: Mini tablets (sub-8 in. screens) will account for as much as 60% of unit shipments
5: Mobile platforms that fail to crack the 50% barrier of developers that are "very interested" in developing apps for them will be on a gradual track to demise.
6: There will be over US$25 billion in software as a service (SaaS) acquisitions over the next 20 months.
7: The number of industry-focused public cloud services platforms will increase tenfold by 2016, while "horizontal" platform as a service (PaaS) will become more commoditised
8: By 2016, 80% of new investments will directly involve line of business (LOB) executives, with LOBs the lead decision makers in half or more of those investments
9: Subheaded '3rd Platform Datacenter Disruptions', this prediction notes that converged systems and software defined networks will drive growth and open the door for market share upheaval. "Bring your own ID" will bring consumerisation to enterprise security
10: Big data mergers and acquisitions will cluster in visual discovery, predictive analytics and text and rich media analytics