Shocking pace of change – Moor Insights to follow

Having VP-ed at the highest levels in the tech industry, Patrick Moorhead has now started his own consultancy and he came over to Monte Carlo to share his latest insights with an eager crowd of EMEA's top buying and selling talent. KitGuru operatives managed to sneak out some telling shots.

Just like KitGuru, Patrick is fascinated with the changes that the future internet will bring. Right now, we're all looking at the launch of 4G and dreaming about a 1Gb connection to our homes – the kind of thing that can be enjoyed in the world's leading technology countries like South Korea.

Right now, labs across the world are working toward products that will operate in the 5-50Gb a second range, while the most advanced research is pushing for a solution that will allow the flow of data around the 450Gb/sec level.

That would be around 45GB/sec.

That's something like 10x quicker than the fastest RAID SSD set up we've seen.

OK, so there are lots of changes coming, but what can really happen in just 5 years. Patrick's opening slides had everything thinking long and hard about the rate of change:-

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That's transmission speed covered, what else is Patrick expecting to have an impact?

Well he is keen on Intel's Computing Continuum or the Internet of Everything, where almost everything around us will be imbued with processing capability and networked so it can share data.

He touched on medical applications, which set up the latest products from the far east perfectly. People are, fundamentally, lazy. If we can have one device for everything, then that's what we'll carry. Processing and interfaces can exist elsewhere – where they are needed – all we have to carry are the essentials.

Patrick illustrated this point with MobiPlug – a technology that allows you to control almost everything around you from a smartphone. Again, back to smartphones. It was hard to get away from these devices at Distree 2013 – even though they played little part in the event 5 years ago.

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Going back to the displays and interfaces, we earlier touched on the phenomenal speeds that will be achieved in hard wired networks in the near future, but Patrick also expects the various WiFi speeds we see now to pick up by a factor of around 50. Easily enough to stream HD from a mobile device to screens around your home, car, office and – pretty much – anywhere else you find yourself.

The device we carry around only needs to be able to scale up and down – according to the kind of display it encounters (we're assuming that the graphics driver won't be .NET based and over 140MB, like Patrick's old employers).

As the world moves toward the cloud, it's unclear what exactly will be carried on these portable devices. i.e. What will be the prime function of the ‘thing in your pocket'. Data?  The ability to process?  Identity?  It will be interesting.

Finally, Patrick drew everyone's attention to WHERE the war is taking place in technology – and where the NEXT battles will be staged.

It's obvious when everything is focused on the devices and the operating systems. More recently, we've seen huge battles between the various Application and Content stores. With Apple pioneering the high street, everyone can see that a well run retail operation can work – which is where Microsoft and Google will be investing heavily over the next few years.

Which brings us to the battlegrounds of the future – control of everything. From the distribution and installation of products – through to the delivery mechanisms and the ability to be the ‘provider of choice', whether it's for home use, on the move or in your preferred method of transport.

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KitGuru says: We're broadly in agreement with Patrick's analysis. While Intel may have popularised the idea of a computing continuum, control of the ‘front to back' will be where the money is rung out of the loop. How the channel makes money in the future is a little less clear, but there will be opportunities.

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