It’s getting to be that time of year when analysts, business writers and anyone else with an opinion begin to make predictions for the year ahead. In terms of enterprise technology, the coming new year may present a number of challenges and opportunities for some companies.

According to Verizon Enterprise Solutions, these technology trends will be mostly about increasing productivity and improving the customer experience.

"As companies look to transform their businesses in the year ahead, Verizon is zeroing in on the most meaningful opportunities for our enterprise and government clients worldwide," David Small, senior vice president and chief platform officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said in a statement. "Next year, we are continuing to sharpen our focus on harnessing the power of our advanced technology platforms to deliver industry-specific solutions that unlock productivity and value for our clients, their customers and society.”

Top technology trends the company foresees include:

An expansion of the hybrid cloud. Distributed data centers and the intelligent wired and mobile networks that connect them now represent a viable alternative to traditional virtual private network (VPN) methods that long have formed the backbone of distributed enterprise communications for a generation.

Supporting employees’ mobile experiences. Companies will more briskly adopt cloud-based enterprise mobility strategies that will allow employees to use enterprise applications to do their jobs more effectively. Companies will also tackle the challenges of dealing with the division of employees' personal and professional lives, by using mobile-device management and private application storefronts to create a more secure, mobile work environment, said Verizon.

The "Internet of Things" will proliferate. The term refers to the increasing interconnectedness of not just communications devices but cars, homes and even appliances via machine-to-machine connections. Verizon says its recent acquisition of Hughes Telematics will help fuel this evolution.

Networks will become smarter. An intelligent fabric that connects everything and everyone will render underlying networks invisible to end users, even as overall IP traffic grows at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent through 2016, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

Security will be a top priority. In 2013, security will move out of the specialist realm and become a mainstream IT must-have, according to Verizon. As networking, the Internet of Things, mobile applications and bring-your-own-device expand and proliferate, the impetus to ensure that security is state-of-the-art will become even stronger.