Global CIO: The Golden Age Of IT Has Begun: 6 Reasons WhyGlobal CIO: The Golden Age Of IT Has Begun: 6 Reasons Why

3) In the past few months, all of the top IT vendors—including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP—have launched specific programs aimed at helping CIOs build their way out of the old, brittle, inflexible, and expensive IT infrastructures they've cobbled together over the past 10-20 years. And top executives from all of those companies have begun to talk very pointedly about helping CIOs escape this deadly trap wherein the CEO is screaming for action on new growth initiatives, but the CIO is crying bankruptcy because 75% or 80% of the IT budget is being sucked up by maintenance and internal IT operations. That leaves precious little for transformative initiatives, and in turn that lack of discretionary funding leaves current CIOs on their CEOs' enemies list. Major IT companies—as well as a host of smaller ones—have begun stepping up to help, and this can be a tremendous advantage for CIOs.

4) Never before in the history of the tech business has so much predictive power been brought to bear on business problems, operational dilemmas, customer behavior and preferences, supply-chain optimization, and more. The rise of predictive analytics—and please be sure to see today's column on the subject from my colleague Rob Preston—is moving out of the blunt-force stage and into a highly refined set of capabilities that don't require a PhD in statistical theory to apply. While IBM's been the leading voice in this field, SAS has made analytics the core of its $2 billion business and now SAP is joining the mix by promising that in-memory technology will allow businesses to perform analytics on live transaction data—the result, SAP says, will allow technology to drive unprecedented insights into what the future holds and thereby enable executives to make better decisions than ever before.

5) Closely tied to that surge in analytical power is the rise of real-time computing that will in turn fuel real-time production planning and real-time decisions on pricing, merchandising, routing, inventory optimization, and financial operations. Both Tibco and SAP point to the power of in-memory technologies as the key behind this new power, and we're not talking about pie-in-the-sky theoretical stuff here: enterprise-application vendor Workday has pointedly noted that all of its products have been using in-memory technology for the past five years. In underscoring the transformative power of this real-time opportunity, both SAP and Tibco—in separate events one week apart—emphasized that the beauty of this new computing model is that people will no longer have to dig through mountains of data to find the one piece of information they need—rather, the information you want will find you. Yes, that's a bit of a mind-bender, but the point is that we're getting past the steroid-juiced days of phenomenally powerful servers with single-digit utilization rates, or applications bulging with hundreds of features that millions of users never touch—instead, after much trial, error, and gnashing of the teeth, we're getting smarter. And we're going to be able to apply all that intelligence instantaneously: in real time. That will rattle the business world, and today's best CIOs will be all over that opportunity and the huge potential it offers for every facet of today's businesses.

6) Remember a few years ago the TV ad showing someone standing in front of a Coke machine and using a smartphone to order and pay for a can? At the time that seemed about as plausible as Dick Tracy did 40 years ago when he had conversations with remote colleagues over his two-way wristwatch. But mobile's promise is about to catch up to its hype and while I'm not sure how many soda-vending machines today will let you order and pay with your iPhone, I do know that all those Android devices and Blackberries and Win7 Mobile phones and iPhones are being targeted as indispensably strategic tools from which to analyze data and information from corporate applications in real time and then make vital business decisions based on those mobile analyses. As we wrote about last week, SAP is leading this charge by declaring that mobile has become the new desktop—not that it might or that it will at some hazy point in the future, but that the profound transformation is already occurring. Opportunistic and customer-driven CIOs are taking full advantage of these megatrends to modernize their Stone-Age infrastructures to liberate precious IT budget dollars to fund new initiatives keyed around the dazzling business insights now possible from predictive analytics offered in real time to an increasing number of mobile devices. That's why this is the Golden Age of IT, with unprecedented opportunities for CIOs and their businesses. Don't let it pass you by.

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: How Will Larry Ellison Counter SAP's Mobile Offensive? Global CIO: Inside HP's Numbers: Mark Hurd's Top 10 Strategic Insights Global CIO: Can Tibco Deliver The 2-Second Advantage? Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard Attacks Innovation Gridlock That's Killing CIOs Global CIO: Calling Oracle & IBM Outdated, Tibco Launches Enterprise 3.0 Global CIO: Oracle Hammered By SAP For Stifling Customer Choice Global CIO: SAP's Hasso Plattner On Databases And Oracle's Larry Ellison Global CIO: IBM's Internal Cloud Projects Could Point To Future Projects Bob Evans is senior VP and director of information's Global CIO unit.

To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his page.

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