Disruptive Technology in the Enterprise: Future trends, impact and vulnerabilities to substitution

The motor car, mobile phones, personal computers, and so on, are all examples of disruptive technologies. There are numerous examples throughout modern business history of disruptive technologies appearing, apparently from nowhere, to threaten and ultimately displace existing technologies and the industries and vendors that grew up around them - such as the mainframe industry, communications and storage.

But disruption is rarely a consequence of technology innovation alone, rather a reflection of how existing organizations and markets deal with it. While disruptive innovation can be seen as a threat, it is also an opportunity, and indeed a necessity in the rapidly evolving world of IT and business technology.

Modern history suggests that accurate prediction of disruptive technologies is challenging, however a look at past examples can reveal important characteristics and similarities between disruptive technologies. This report aims to provide insight into the patterns and characteristics of potentially disruptive technologies and innovation trends, and provide ways of assessing vulnerability to disruption. As a result, organizations can use this insight to understood how best to avoid the threat of disruption.

Key features of this report

• A survey of CIOs in a variety of vertical industries and geographies provides insight into how innovation is managed, and where there is current vulnerability to disruption.
• A proprietary assessment model for gaining insight into how successful a potentially disruptive technology could be.
• Offers an assessment model for understanding and avoiding vulnerability to disruptive technologies.
• CIO survey reveals where there is most demand for improvements in technology performance and efficiency.
• Analysis of 4 new technologies showing which technologies could be potentially disruptive.

• a) Gain insight into where there are current vulnerabilities to technological disruption.
• b) Understand how to identify and characterise potentially disruptive technologies.
• c) Find out where CIOs believe there is the greatest need for technological improvement.
• d) Gain access to a disruption assessment model, which provides a method for assessing vulnerability to disruption.
• e) Understand which industries and organisations are potentially vulnerable to technological disruption.

• Disruptions not only displace technologies, they also fundamentally shift the balance of power in entire industries and, often, spell the end for established market leading vendors.
• There is nothing disruptive per se about any new technology; rather disruption comes from the manner in which the industry leaders and players manage it.
• The drivers and inhibitors of disruption can be broadly divided into two factors: customer need (driver), such as greater performance, lower cost, scalability, portability etc. and; barriers to entry (inhibitor), which can include unproven ROI, lack of knowledge, cost of switchover, and so on.
• Cloud computing is very likely to become a ubiquitous computing model once the challenges are dealt with, and once the issue of trust is overcome.
• Virtualization’s promise of significantly reduced energy consumption costs and hardware estate costs, combined with the IT and business agility benefits it offers, and relative ease and cost of integration and deployment means that it is very likely to see massive uptake, and become an ubiquitous technology within 10 years.

• a) What characteristics are common to disruptive technologies?
• b) How can organizations assess their vulnerability to disruption?
• c) Will open source communication devices threaten the incumbent market leaders for mobile application development?
• d) What impact will the adoption of cloud computing as an ubiquitous IT delivery system have on existing market leaders?
• e) Will NAND Flash memory replace DRAM and disk in the data center?