This MSP Today reporter first attended IDC’s annual predictions in the mid-80’s, an event where analyst Frank Gens got to show his stuff. Nearly three decades later, Gens is no worse for wear, and is still leading the predictions charge—this time made via Webcast.

At my first event, the impact of the PC and LANs was all the rage. This year Gens is predicting big things for what is now known as the Third Platform. This platform consists of four pieces, cloud services, big data and analytics, mobile and social networking.

“The 3rd Platform's impact was felt throughout the ICT industry in 2013 as a high-profile CEO lost his job, a major IT player went private, numerous vendors endured cash cow stagnation, and billion-dollar bets were placed on 3rd Platform technologies,” said Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC. “In 2014, we'll see every major player make big investments to scale up cloud, mobile, and big data capabilities, and fiercely battle for the hearts and minds of the developers who will create the solutions driving the next two decades of IT spending. Outside the IT industry, 3rd Platform technologies will play a leading role in the disruption (or “Amazoning”) of almost every other industry on the planet.”

This Third Platform is going to help drive IT spending, which IDC sees as rising 5 percent to hit $2.1 trillion next year. Third Platform technologies, meanwhile, will grow 15 percent.

MeriTalk’s Nomenclature

Where IDC has four technologies that form its Third platform, MeriTalk talks about the Big Five -- big data, the cloud, data center consolidation, mobility and security. The problem is not all networks can handle the Big Five. MeriTalk to points to the U.S. federal government which is woefully unprepared.

The result of deficient networks? Bottlenecks. Potentially huge bottlenecks. This isn’t just an issue for the feds. Anyone moving substantial chunks of computing to the cloud has to look the network, and look at it on and end-to-end basis. First is the internal corporate network, then the egress/ingress points, the speed of the service provider’s network (for big cloud apps dedicated connections are usually a must) and finally the speed of the service providers’ internal network.

MeriTalk’s report, “The Net of Federal Networks: Will You Survive the Big Five?” dives into these issues. And the research was funded by Brocade which has a fiduciary interest in helping the feds boosts their networks. That doesn’t make the research bad; it is just something worth noting.

“Federal agencies plan to fully deploy the Big Five in the next two years but their networks aren’t prepared for the additional capacity or complexity which will result in network bottlenecks,” the research argued. It is not just the network, but the rest of the infrastructure that also needs tending to, apparently. Security must be boosted as new apps create new attack surfaces, and storage must be boosted (of course as any IT pro knows, storage must always be boosted).