New Year, New Trends: What to Look for in Technology in 2014

It’s hard to believe, but it’s already the time of year we look into our crystal ball and predict the top technology trends for the coming year. 2014 is right around the corner, so here’s a look at what we think will be some of the dominant topics in the tech world.
 
Hedge Fund Outsourcing Grows in Popularity
One dominant topic that came up during our Boston hedge fund event earlier this month was outsourcing. According to several experts, hedge funds and investment firms can and should continue to outsource areas of their business to service providers as a strategic initiative. Outsourcing leave the nuts and bolts of any area (be it technology, fund administration, etc.) to the service provider, and it allows the fund to focus on higher value areas including, naturally, investment management.
 
Cloud Solutions Become the Standard
There is no denying the steady adoption of cloud services among hedge funds and investment firms over the years. In fact, our 2013 Cloud Usage Survey shows adoption has risen to nearly nine out of ten firms across the U.S. In 2014, we believe the cloud will become the de facto solution for businesses as firms gravitate towards the simplicity, flexibility and ease of management the cloud has to offer.
 
Security Remains Top Concern
For the last few years, security has been a prominent area of focus for businesses of all kinds, especially investment firms. We’ve spent countless hours talking about hedge fund security and offering our best practices and tips for firms to rely on to stay protected. Unfortunately, cyber-attacks and security threats still pose serious risks, and all firms must work diligently in 2014 to stay educated on the topic and implement sound practices to mitigate any internal breaches or external vulnerabilities. We believe security is such a serious topic, in fact, we’re even kicking off our 2014 webinar series with an installment on Incident Response. To pre-register for this event, email us.
 
BlackBerry’s Decline Continues
BlackBerry made headlines again this week, as its co-founder abandoned plans to buy the company outright and reduced his stake in the company to under five percent. The announcement comes on the heels of news that BlackBerry lost $4.4 billion last quarter and is discontinuing hardware development to focus more on the software side of the business. In 2014, we expect Apple and other smartphone devices and operating systems to continue their dominance as BlackBerry, sadly, becomes a name of the past.
 
The War Goes On: PC vs. Tablet
Speaking of changes, one could argue there will be no greater transition on the technology front than the current shift away from PCs and toward tablets and smartphones (BlackBerry excluded, apparently).
 
According to some, tablets are the new PCs and will account for about half of the “PC” global market share in 2014. Others predict traditional PC purchases to increase in the future as refresh cycles hit and more traditional consumers opt to stay true to the devices they have previously owned. Earlier this year, Intel sponsored an InfoBrief which found that U.S. adults are still using traditional PCs as their primary computing devices. Productivity will play a significant role is how both consumers and businesses select which devices to use and recommend.

Be sure to come back next week as we take a look back at our top Hedge IT blog posts of 2013!