The impact levels of new and emerging macro trends are defined as:
emerging (likely to drive business needs in the future—keep watching), through maturing, to burning (you cannot afford to ignore—already driving new business needs).

The pace of change for technologies is rapid. The speed at which new inventions are coming to the market and being copied is increasing whilst product lifecycles are getting shorter. Technologies today are advancing at a far quicker pace than ever before. Consumers, particularly Generation Y, are used to using more and more sophisticated technologies as part of their everyday lives. As change is happening faster, organizations need to be looking to harvest a larger crop of ideas to keep up. Open innovation enables organizations to do this.

The amount of data collected by elements such as sensors, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, and wearable devices, is growing and will continue to grow exponentially as our world turns into a world where computing power is within everything we use on a daily basis. With this rising flood of data, organizations and individuals need to find a means to filter out the wheat from the chaff so that they can focus on what is important. New tools will be needed to manage the masses of data.

We can mitigate this somewhat through Data Visualization. This will enable us to present this often complex, multi-dimensional data in a visual format using dimensions such as color, size, and shape. The aim is to portray information in a way that is easy to understand, so that users can focus on what is important to them.

Technology will enable access to information from anywhere on any device as it becomes part of the furniture and can be defined as Ubiquitous Computing and Ubiquitous Network Connectivity. Not only will technology become part of the furniture, but it will also become part of what we wear, extending the term to Wearable Computers. These systems will monitor our health, our location, and provide us with information on the go.

New ways of interfacing with computers such as voice, 3D interfaces (immersive applications), touch, and thought will help to drive this evolution toward new ways of computing. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) technologies—for example, brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence, and emotion detection—are being investigated in order to build innovative ways of interfacing as Interactive Avatars or Virtual Advisors. The humanizing trends and these new interfaces will be enhanced through other basic HCI technologies such as speech, voice, and natural language processing techniques. HCI technologies are a key enabler to build future conversational interfaces for all kinds of applications and to enhance accessibility to Web and mobile channels.

The wireless world will become a reality, enabling these embedded devices to talk. New mobile applications, devices, terminals, and interoperability standards will enable the development of wireless mobile computing.

The adoption of an IT infrastructure optimization strategy looking for agility, cost reductions, and focusing on going green is a directive in data-centers nowadays. Virtualization (or physical consolidation) will allow for the reduction of horizontal growth. Logical consolidation will also allow the sharing of workloads between several virtual machines placed in different physical machines, whereas rationalization will allow the identification of unnecessary or redundant applications that can be eliminated.

Moreover, extending virtualization to desktop environments will promote user mobilization by achieving new computational models and protecting critical information at data-center levels. On the other hand, virtualization will be a technology enabler, providing the scalability and agility needed to service providers in emerging models, like Cloud Computing.

Evolution toward miniaturization will be one of the other technological trends alongside virtualization 2.0 and Green IT. Green technology will help reduce energy usage and wastage, increasing recycling of redundant hardware as well as enabling collaboration to the extent that the need for travel, particularly via air-transport, is reduced. Cloud Computing, despite being an evolving and not yet fully mature concept, will become an alternative delivery and acquisition model for organizations. It will create considerable value in terms of scale, flexibility, time-to-market, environmental efficiency, and costs. Cloud Computing can also be known as XaaS or everything as a service, and will be the seed for other emerging business models such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Utility Computing.

In the near future, through interoperability and cross-platform solutions, Utility Computing models will package computing capabilities (such as process and storage) as a metered service, similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, natural telephone network).

Although the Semantic and the Contextual Web, also referred as Web 3.0, is a few years off full realization, niche applications such as Semantic Search Engines are available.

One important effect of social networks and social software, as part of Web 2.0, is the capability to create, aggregate, update, and easily share knowledge between communities of persons. This focus can provide different ways of solving business problems in companies and it will be a way for evolving and linking Internet / Intranet / Extranet applications in the short term toward the broader concept of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 3.0. For example, a company could replace an employee FAQ for an internal forum, a chat or other Web 2.0 tools, such as Mashups. As social networks and collaborative tools are spreading through society, and technology innovation is delivered first to costumers in a consumer-to-business (C2B) model instead of business-to-consumer (B2C), technology evolution is more led by the consumer market than the corporate world.

Open Source Software (OSS) promotes interoperability between many vendors, and allows free access to source that enables rapid tailoring and bug-fixing. Support can be obtained from a number of different sources, giving a wider choice for the user community.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being implemented by the leading market companies. These forms of architecture are characterized by the fact that they are composed of functional units (services) rendered by service businesses. SOA architectures enable the development of Business Process Management (BPM) applications, supporting corporate processes as a defined composition of business activities, each of which is a service provided by SOA. BPM and SOA may arise as independent initiatives but only with an integrated view are the full benefits of both realized.

Information agenda and information transparency are concepts for a holistic approach to the use of business information (structured and unstructured), disregarding specific operations or business processes. It maximizes the value of the data, bringing together the best practices in data modeling and market analysis at competitive cost. This approach through Enterprise Information Management / Enterprise Information Planning systems will impact the Business Intelligence area, as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has impacted the applications area.

What will the Future Internet look like? The Web is becoming more intelligent while enabling us to communicate better within a boundless society, evolving toward a virtual brain or engine. Using Artificial Intelligence technologies and a memory based on our own experiences and collective intelligence, the Web will be able to make decisions, predictions and recommendations that will enhance our own decision-making.