Gartner: Five Megatrends As Personal Cloud Replaces PC Era

Steve Jobs called it the post-PC era. Gartner has another term for today’s world of personal computing meshed with mobility and the cloud. Indeed, A new Gartner report is dubbed “The New PC Era: The Personal Cloud.” Gartner contends that the era of the PC as the hub of business computing will end by 2014. The personal cloud will replace it, bringing along with it flexibility in choosing devices, enhanced user satisfaction and greater worker productivity.

A word of caution from Gartner: Businesses will have to “fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.”

“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” said Steve Kleynhans, Gartner VP of research, in a prepared statement. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

What will the computing environment look like in five years? Steve Kleynhans said:

“Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isn’t really about being ‘after’ the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives.”

In the report, Gartner identifies five consumer technology “megatrends” that extend back more than a decade but have realigned to help create the new business and personal computing reality. “The combination of these megatrends, coupled with advances in new enabling technologies, is ushering in the era of the personal cloud,” said Kleynhans.

The five megatrends the Gartner report cites are:

1. Consumerization: “Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have similar technology available to them.”
2. Virtualization: “Virtualization has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can implement client environments.”
3. ‘App-ification’: “When the way that applications are designed, delivered and consumed by users changes, it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market.”
4. The Ever-Available Self-Service Cloud: “The advent of the cloud for servicing individual users” means that users “can now have a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do.”
5. The Mobility Shift: “At any point in time, and depending on the scenario, any given device will take on the role of the user’s primary device — the one at the center of the user’s constellation of devices.”

Kleynhans described the cloud work environment these five megatrends are producing:

“In this new world, the specifics of devices will become less important for the organization to worry about. Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, but no one device will be the primary hub. Rather, the personal cloud will take on that role. Access to the cloud and the content stored or shared in the cloud will be managed and secured, rather than solely focusing on the device itself.”

The Gartner report “The New PC Era: The Personal Cloud” is available for purchase on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1890215.

Additionally, this new release is part of the Gartner Special Report, “Consumer Research: Personal Cloud” and is accessible at: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/personal-cloud/. The special report has links to reports examining the personal cloud and businesses, and also video commentary.