We asked 10 of our most prominent IT experts to predict what IT looks like in 2019 and beyond. These predictions can help shape your IT department’s priorities and budgets for this year and the future.

In the first several months of 2019 these experts will provide some commentary and justifications for their predictions in blog posts and on webinars. Watch for those on Ivanti.com.

What do you predict will be the biggest IT trend in 2019 and beyond?

Our Essential ITAM Resolutions

When it comes to IT asset management (ITAM), the future is unified and automated. In 2019, consider these five areas in which improvements will help you globally mitigate risk, achieve compliance, scale your operations securely, and better control costs:

  1. Visibility and Performance – Make sure you have a reliable discovery tool that can discover and run an inventory of every asset attached to the corporate network. Ensure peak performance and productivity with a clear tracking process and refresh policy.
  2. Compliance and Risk Management – With IoT and other advancements in tech, it’s critical that organizations can conduct an audit of all devices to ensure data security. Speaking of audits, you’ll need a good software asset management tool to help you know your current software license position.
  3. Cost Management and Fiscal Accountability –An automated system that updates and populates the database of when a new asset purchase order is opened, when an asset has generated too many trouble calls, or which vendors’ licenses require more scrutiny—and one that helps you manage and track all digital assets – is your ticket to cost control.
  4. Business Scalability and the Cloud – Get insights before expanding, such as what assets can be repurposed or refreshed, what apps you’ll need, etc. Cloud apps are now an integral part of any business scaling up; your ability to automate processes and easily update inventory and service desk requests is essential to supporting any scaling upward.
  5. End-User Experience – Give users the experience they deserve by establishing set hardware refresh dates and using automation to quickly complete requests and handle service tickets.

Join our upcoming webinar where IT pros will discuss their 2019 predictions.

As for other predictions for asset managers, the experts at International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers have these predictions to offer:

  • Contract management will become a new emphasis for IT Asset Managers
  • Strong focus on cybersecurity will continue
  • ITAM and ITSM will continue to blend

Going further in-depth, Martin Thompson at the ITAM Review suggests asset managers consider these points when approaching ITAM initiatives in 2019:

  • ITAM is growing in seniority and influence, maintaining organizational commitment remains a major challenge for worldwide ITAM functions.
  • Smart management of IT assets is now a company issue - not just an IT issue. This is due to many more buyers of IT coming from outside the IT department.
  • ITAM departments are maturing. Once an administrative stock keeping function, the leading ITAM departments around the world are strategic advisories, helping leaders make smarter decisions.
  • Organizational commitment remains a major challenge for ITAM professionals; organizational commitment (establishing and maintaining a mandate, getting buy-in and securing budget) will be their biggest challenge in the next five years.
  • Cloud usage has tipped over from small-scale experiments to a major unmanaged beast, one that is yet to be tamed for an increasing number of organizations. Cloud is less about license compliance and more about cost management, with unnecessary or over-provisioned resources costing organizations money every second.
  • As we move into the 2020s, the ITAM function faces the issues of both increasing environment complexity and an increasing number of stakeholders to engage with, i.e. the CMO buying turnkey cloud based solutions such as customer relationship management software. 
  • ITAM’s new role is helping the business embrace these new technologies as fast as possible whilst also providing the necessary guardrails to ensure IT assets, and budgets, are managed. Data sovereignty, user management and cost management become the new headaches.

Here are a few more predictions on the future of IT:

  • By 2020, overwhelming user demand (due to consumer technology experiences) will be pushing IT into introducing multiple conversational AI / virtual assistants in the workplace. This will manifest as new self-service interfaces between users and service delivery functions. 
  • By 2021, successful IT organizations will be automating IT operations across traditionally separated IT silos—spread across Cloud and Premises as appropriate.  Companies that continue to operate non-unified IT ops silos will be losing in their markets to their automated competitors. 
  • By 2022, large enterprises will still depend on at least 50 line of business Win32 applications.
  • By the year 2028, 95% of all IT tasks and business processes performed manually today will be fully automated.
  • By 2020, Microsoft will be the largest AV vendor in the market. It will have over 50% of that market and will be recognized as the trusted AV vendor. 
  • 2019 will be the year of panic to migrate devices to Windows 10. Approximately 100% of companies will have significant projects to complete or mostly complete this migration.
  • In 2020, companies who are unable to move away from Windows 7 and unwilling to pay for extended support from Microsoft will be exposed to critical vulnerabilities that will leave them exposed to significant risk, with limited means to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

Check out the rest of our predictions for IT asset management and beyond. Click below to download our white paper loaded with insights from Ivanti’s expert IT Fortunetellers.

Expert predictions for 2019 and beyond