Being relatively isolated geographically, there’s also a desire to go beyond our boundaries and create a global impact. Some startups have replicated their success in the home market and become true global companies.

The biggest movers in the 2016 IT landscape are likely to be hybrid cloud, integration, and changing roles with the organisation.

Awareness and uptake and of cloud has reached new levels. There’s certainly no question regarding awareness, as there’s no project where cloud is not on the table when we’re talking to customer across the board, including major telecoms and financial companies.

With greenfield companies and startups, everything goes to cloud. Uptake is a bit slower in larger organizations but is firmly on the agenda of every board room, as they’re trying to find lower costs at the same time as boosting business agility. In addition the New Zealand government is making efforts to improve internal efficiencies and consolidating platforms, including within the healthcare sector. This has been accompanied by a large uptake in the cloud.

Not only in 2016 but going forward over the next decade, the hybrid cloud will take center stage. There will be an extended journey to the cloud as companies prioritise IT systems and move 20 percent 40 percent, 60 percent and so on to the cloud. Choices have to be practical and pragmatic and properly assess risk and performance. For example, core banking systems might stay on-premise but customer self-service through web and mobile, as well as some corporate functions such as HR systems, can move to the cloud.

Integration is the biggest driver going forward
There’s been a lot of growth in accidental IT architectures and shadow IT systems where individual lines of business buy software packages from different vendors, acquired outside the scope of control of the CIO. For example, we’re seeing sales, marketing, and service center systems often operating independently of core ERP systems, just serving as a contacts system and sales predictions systems. This creates isolated information pools and disparate workflows.

To capture real value they have to be integrated back into the enterprise in terms of integration as well as security. Corporate boards are now looking at the big picture of IT architecture and data governance and want to capture the value of enterprise-wide analytics to make sense of information they have.

The changing role of business leaders
In a similar way, the changing role of business leaders will be a big theme in 2016. Lots of businesses are building out external IT connections to integrate with broader IT ecosystems, including embracing the internet of things. Corporate boards are now grasping the scope of that change, and we’re seeing organisational changes with new roles such as Chief Digital Officer, Chief Security Officer, Chief Policy Officer, and more.

As a result, IT Salespeople are now talking to business stakeholders other than the CIO, and that trend will increase in 2016. Our subject matter experts are talking with their customer subject experts such as the CHRO and CMO. But we can also talk to the CIO and the Chief Integration Officer about the business flow across processes and increased agility with integrated system, and talk about data perspectives with the Chief Data Officer.

Other game changers on the radar
Robotics and artificial intelligence are a big driver, in particular with machine learning capabilities in industrial production. There’s a lot of apprehension regarding the balance between employment versus productivity and self service, but there will be net benefits all round.

Immersive, virtual reality technologies are not just for gaming, they can be a game-changer in real-life applications such as training in the medical field.

And there’s plenty of potential for more autonomous cars. There are some ambitious projects around the world with cars going fully driverless, such as Toyota with pilots in Tokyo and Tesla and Google. It’s not so much about cars being self-driving or self-parking, but being aware of the surrounding environment so you can also safely increase car density. People don’t realise how many sensors we have around as we move towards the Internet of Things.

In just about every corner of the economy, tech is pushing the boundaries, and it looks like 2016 will be no exception. It’s going to be an exciting year all round!

ABOUT ROBERT GOSLING//

Robert Gosling is MD at Oracle New Zealand.