Mark Lyn­der­say

Court­ney Munroe, the fea­tured keynote speak­er at last Thurs­day's Mi­crosoft M4 con­fer­ence at the Hy­att has a lot to say about glob­al ICT trends, but one of his stand out cau­tions to in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sion­als that morn­ing was the an­tic­i­pat­ed growth in what he de­scribed as "shad­ow IT."

Munroe, VP for Tele­com Re­search for the In­ter­na­tion­al Da­ta Cor­po­ra­tion, a not­ed think-tank of tech­nol­o­gy an­a­lysts and re­searchers is Guyanese but now op­er­ates out of Mi­a­mi.IDC sees the im­me­di­ate fu­ture of tech­nol­o­gy de­vel­op­ment as hap­pen­ing un­der four main pil­lars, cloud tech­nol­o­gy, mo­bil­i­ty, so­cial and big da­ta.

Much of what's to come in that space is be­ing seed­ed right now in emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. Cog­ni­tive sys­tems and au­toma­tion, the growth and ubiq­ui­ty of cloud based so­lu­tions and the growth of in­dus­try and per­son­al ro­bot­ics aren't in their nascent stages any­more, but they are still to be­come ubiq­ui­tous.

IDC ex­pects, for in­stance that more than 30 bil­lion sen­sors will be ac­tive in the world over the next few years, elec­tron­ic feel­ers that will be in­creas­ing­ly ac­ti­vat­ed and con­nect­ed by the In­ter­net of Things.But shad­ow IT is with us right now and rep­re­sents both chal­lenges and op­por­tu­ni­ties as in­creas­ing­ly savvy users make use of com­mon­ly avail­able tech­nolo­gies in their work­flow be­fore get­ting the for­mal ap­proval of IT de­part­ments.

In­eke Geesnik, Win­dows Busi­ness Group Lead at Mi­crosoft LATAM agreed with Munroe's ob­ser­va­tions about "the con­sumeri­sa­tion of tech­nol­o­gy."

"What peo­ple need on the busi­ness side is be­com­ing sim­i­lar to what com­pa­nies need and mil­lenials com­ing in­to com­pa­nies are bring­ing their own chal­lenges," Geesnik ex­plained.

Nowhere has this been clear­er than in the world of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, where car­ri­ers are be­ing hurt by con­sumers who make use of chat and com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices built in­to so­cial me­dia chan­nels.The re­sponse to that, Munroe sug­gests, is the move to hy­brid IT, which will find com­pa­nies and busi­ness­es de­vel­op­ing cus­tom so­lu­tions that specif­i­cal­ly ad­dress in­ter­nal as well as cus­tomer needs us­ing open source tools in­stead of try­ing to make sys­tems fit in­to off-the shelf sys­tems.

IDC sees the growth of tra­di­tion­al IT so­lu­tions de­clin­ing rel­a­tive to these next gen­er­a­tion so­lu­tions in the fu­ture.IDC has found that 60 per cent of on­line trans­ac­tions take place via so­cial me­dia apps, mark­ing a cru­cial con­ver­gence of mar­ket­ing and ser­vices.

The com­pa­ny projects that more than 50 per cent of e-com­merce trans­ac­tions will take place on mo­bile de­vices by 2020 and by then, most en­ter­prise mo­bile apps will be op­ti­mised for phone and tablet use, not PCs and WiFi hotspots will dri­ve half of all In­ter­net ac­cess.In the Caribbean, T&T tops the charts for mo­bile pen­e­tra­tion at 158 per cent, fol­lowed by Bar­ba­dos at 103 per cent and Guyana at 99 per cent.

By com­par­i­son, Bar­ba­dos leads in fixed broad­band pen­e­tra­tion at 27 per cent, with T&T at 20 per cent and Puer­to Ri­co at 17 per cent.Glob­al­ly, in­fra­struc­ture is shift­ing to dig­i­tal fi­bre to sup­port a in­dus­try shift from be­ing hard­ware-cen­tric to an en­vi­ron­ment based on soft­ware.At a press con­fer­ence af­ter his pre­sen­ta­tion, Court­ney Munroe ac­knowl­edged the need for gov­ern­ments to dri­ve such in­fra­struc­ture needs.

"Oh, ab­solute­ly, Gov­ern­ment has a role to play in dri­ving in­vest­ment in the tech­nolo­gies," he said.

"Coun­tries which have done so are strong, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Asia, where gov­ern­ment have ei­ther di­rect­ly in­vest­ed in tech­nol­o­gy or pro­vid­ed a frame­work for tech­nol­o­gy to flour­ish." "T&T is very ad­vanced rel­a­tive to oth­er re­gion­al and Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries, the ground­work is there for Trinidad to be one of the lead­ers; the in­fra­struc­ture base is def­i­nite­ly there."

Munroe ac­knowl­edged Dig­i­cel as one com­pa­ny that's pro­vid­ed a mod­el for ag­gres­sive own­er­ship of its mar­ket space, as proven by "The amount of work they have put in and the num­ber of coun­tries they have en­tered, push­ing ri­vals out of some of those mar­kets." The next wave of de­vel­op­ment will be in build­ing on the ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture and in­creas­ing­ly ac­ces­si­ble de­vel­op­ment tools.

Marc Reguera, Di­rec­tor of Fi­nance, World­wide Mi­crosoft ob­served that: "In the last few years, the cloud has of­fered an in­cred­i­ble en­vi­ron­ment for de­vel­op­ment and in­no­va­tion, but IT de­part­ments have a role in en­sur­ing that the da­ta is ac­ces­si­ble and se­cure."

"At Mi­crosoft, our watch­words are dis­ci­pline at the core, flex­i­bil­i­ty at the edge. You need the bal­ance to dri­ve in­no­va­tion."