Stephen Dewitt is Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett-Packard. DeWitt was also previously CEO and President of Azul Systems and President and CEO of Cobalt Systems. Check out his thoughts on the coming wave of cloud-based apps and the implications for IT operations.

Q: How important will apps be in 2020?

A: We’re going to live in a world defined by applications. There will be 6 billion people online who use 30 billion devices on a 1.3-trillion sensor network. Every automobile, trellis, winery and corn row will have sensors. With these devices and sensors, we will conduct half a trillion e-commerce transactions every day. Enterprises have to deliver an application portfolio for that world, and their apps cannot be tied to devices. They have to become cloud-based and able to be pushed to anything with glass. This reality is going to define every aspect of IT and the human ability to tap into data. By 2020, we will talk about our own "state” rather than our own devices.

Q: What does this mean for IT Operations?

A: In the old world, you buy more infrastructure than you need to. In the new world, a requirement comes in, IT drives it and the infrastructure just dances. Let me explain:

In the app-centric world of 2020, businesses will have sets of characteristics and requirements, such as global, uptime, performance, cost structure, update frequency. IT will bring in that information and go through dev/test cycles. This step will take place outside the company’s core infrastructure on external compute cycles. IT will scale it, secure it, and ensure it meets compliance requirements. Then the resulting application goes to the production team. IT Ops takes it in, applies characteristics, and then the infrastructure will provision automatically.

Q: How will enterprises capture all the info that is in those pipes?

A: Analytics has to become an inline function. I’ll share an example:

Five years ago a soft drink brand approached HP to automate the routes its delivery trucks drive in Mexico. The company delivers to 2 million points of presence every two weeks, dropping off palettes at supermarkets, gas stations and other retail venues. Now, the company wants to go a step further to shape its traffic, build a community, create apps and leverage analytics. Management wants to build relationships with customers. They can only do that by bringing data back to the mothership, computating what’s going on and changing course to drive conversations. You don’t solve that with 50 new servers. The entire world in 2020 is about information optimization.

What do you think? Read Chapter 2: Dev Center 20/20 now and continue the conversation at Enterprise 20/20.

Look for more from Stephen DeWitt when we publish Chapter 4: IT Operations 20/20, in November 2012.