IBM Tech Trends 2011 Highlights Biz Analytics Needs

Okay, you know that the cloud and better mobility management are going to be two of the top tech trends in just about anyone's survey. And IBM's latest report verifies this. But what you probably didn't know is how important analytics will play. IBM interviewed more than 4,000 IT pros from around the world and consolidated its results here.

Of the key technologies surveyed, analytics was the most widely adopted (90%) with half of those not currently using it planning to do so within the next two years. Developers who want to grow their analytics skills set need to focus on Open source platforms like Apache Hadoop. Moreover, analytics was named as the most in demand area for software development in the future. Is that enough about analytics?

When the 2011 Tech Trend survey respondents were asked which skills they needed to develop and/or deploy business analytics solutions, here is the resulting tag cloud of answers.

51% of respondents stated that adopting cloud technology is part of their mobile strategy, which just confirms our opening statement. Finally, India is way ahead of Russia in terms of adopting social business technologies.

You can watch this short summary video of IBM VP Scott Hebner talk about his reactions.

What I found interesting wasn't necessarily the report: we get plenty of surveys each week by various vendors. But the openness and the way that IBM is trying to engage you to talk about its results. For example, the video above: there are several more, some better than others, for busy IT execs that just want to watch a minute or so summaries. There is a Twitter hashtag you can follow, although so far it is more just promoting the report than any reaction to it, here at #TechTrends. Finally, you can download the results as an SPSS dataset to do your own analysis, along with a detailed report on the demographics of the respondents, both of which is the first time I have seen that with one of these reports.