Every fifteen years or so, the IT industry has witnessed new innovations in

computing which have changed the way IT services are delivered to the business
and end users. After the mainframe era, mini-computing era, personal computer and
client-server era, and the Internet era (or more correctly, the Web era), were now in
what many call the fifth wave of corporate IT. This fifth wave is characterized by a
new master IT architecture comprised of social, mobile, analytics and cloud
technologies collectively known as SMAC.
In this article, I thought it might be interesting to look at the trajectory of these
evolutions in IT to see what SMAC may bring over the next several years. One of the
key changes over time, throughout all these evolutions, has been the exponentially
increasing processing power of computers, and the steady growth in the number of
computing devices, applications and users. The table below shows the rough
magnitude of these changes across the various computing eras dates and
numbers are approximate just to give a sense of the order of magnitude.
Dates

Computers

approximat
e

approximat
e

Mainframe

1950-1965

MiniComputing

IT Era

Application
s

Users

approximate

approximat
e

~100,000

Thousands

Millions

1965-1980

~10M

Thousands

Tens of
millions

PC &
Client/Serve
r

1980-1995

~100M

Tens of
thousands

Hundreds of
millions

Internet
(Web)

1995-2010

~1B

Hundreds of
thousands

Billions

SMAC

2010-2025?

Tens of
billions

Millions

Billions

Source: Various sources including Cognizant, IDC, Unisys

The real promise of SMAC technologies is not necessarily their individual
contributions or their cost savings and process efficiencies for IT, but their potential to
support the continued digitization and automation of business models and
processes. According to many, were moving into a new digital industrial revolution.
Three Emerging Market Forces

Over the next several years, I see three emerging market forces, whose effects are
already being felt across all industries and geographies, impacting not only the
nature of IT, but also the nature of how we conduct business itself. The IT
department of the future will need to address these market forces by leveraging an
array of emerging and disruptive technologies, including SMAC architectures, to
support their business opportunities in the most efficient manner.
A New Work Style Combining Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Todays
customers and employees, particularly digital natives, are expecting a new style of
commerce, content and collaboration thats social-, mobile-, analytics-, and cloudenabled. Theyre looking for the same anytime, anywhere, and any-device
convenience that theyre familiar with in their personal lives through applications from
companies such as Amazon and Facebook. In terms of device usage, the mobile
elite in the workforce currently utilize three or more personal devices for work and
this number will only increase as wearable devices such glasses and watches add to
end user options.
In the SMAC era, the next generation of business applications needs to embrace this
same approach to enhance the end user experience, and maximize convenience
and productivity, as SMAC-enabled architectures become the preferred application
paradigm and means of interaction.
As part of this new architecture, IT departments will need a capability equivalent to a
user experience engine to provide the SMAC technology integration, management
and personalization layer providing a contextually-relevant experience to end users
and supporting their new work style. Its not just about mobile device management,
mobile application management, and social platforms all in silos, but about
integrating these capabilities into a seamless user experience.
Digitization of business models and processes As society and national GDPs
continue to migrate to the Internet economy, traditional business processes, business
models and even entire industries are being disrupted as products and services
become ever-more digitized. While many industries have already experienced this
disruption, such as those in media and entertainment whose primary product or
service has become completely digitized (e.g. books, music, movies, maps), the next
wave is now being felt as other industries see aspects of their physical value chain
become ever-more technology-enabled and optimized.
Correspondingly, in the SMAC era, the role of the CIO within many organizations is
now changing. Its moving from that of an engineer, operating IT as the engine
room, to that of a pioneer helping the C-Suite make IT an actual part of the
business. In many cases, industrial-age business models and processes are being

torn-down into their component activities, or units of work, and completely redesigned from the ground up in the new digital context.

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In light of this, a key IT skill for the future may be that of business process analysts,
or perhaps business process scientists along the same lines as the current need for
data scientists. Much like entrepreneurs, these business process scientists will
combine deep skills in business process analysis and design with a unique
understanding of how to leverage emerging technologies.
In addition, in terms of IT infrastructure, a capability equivalent to a digital assembly
line will be required by IT departments to provide agile assembly and dynamic
execution of digital services supported by a hybrid cloud infrastructure leveraging
software-defined principles. According to Gartner, in terms of assembling
services, hybrid cloud environments will be increasingly required to support static,
deployment, event, and dynamic service composition. You can think of this as the
continued evolution of as-a-service platforms, and capabilities such as cloud service
brokers, towards a highly dynamic and flexible model for assembling and providing
digital services.
The Information Inflection Point The exponential growth in computing devices
and data brought about by the Internet economy, the consumerization of IT, and the
emerging Internet of Things is placing new requirements and burdens on the data
center in terms of being able to collect, manage and interpret this information to
support effective business decision-making. Existing information infrastructures are
not equipped for the volume, velocity or variety of this information. According to
Cisco, the number of devices connected to IP networks will be nearly three times as
high as the global population in 2017.
In the SMAC era, IT departments will need to provide an information infrastructure
layer capable of not only processing vast amounts of data streaming into the
enterprise in real-time, but also capable of learning from this information and making
intelligent decisions. You can think of this as an intelligent management and

operations capability within their enterprise architecture. To give a sense of the

growing importance of this trend, by 2017, 10% of computers will be learning rather
than processing.
Summary
In summary, these three market forces are all macro-level changes that will impact
how IT supports, enables, and transforms the business in the years ahead as part of
this fifth wave of corporate IT. There will be digital services that are purchased within
line-of-business areas and digital services that IT will continue to provide to the entire
organization.
IT departments will need to master the development and deployment of SMACenabled applications and infrastructures with attention to three key areas: developing
core skills around supporting the new work style of their customers and employees,
understanding how to assess business processes for transformation via SMAC
technologies, and, finally, addressing the upcoming information inflection point. They
will accomplish this last objective not only by dealing with the sheer scale and
velocity of their data streams, but by focusing on machine-learning capabilities and
intelligent analytics to make smart decisions related to this information in addition to
routine processing.
A key element that must not be forgotten in the SMAC discussion is that
cybersecurity needs to be embedded and pervasive. As part of their new SMAC
architecture, addressing the major disruptive trends, organizations will need a new
cybersecurity framework and architecture as the traditional security perimeter
dissolves into a virtualized environment.
Of course, as is always the case, just as IT departments support a highly
heterogeneous mix of applications and infrastructure in todays environment, this will
certainly continue in the years ahead. Success will most likely be realized by those
organizations that not only migrate quickly to the new SMAC paradigm, but who
figure out how to deal with hybrid environments as they effect the transition from one
evolution of IT to the next.