Gartner's Top Vertical Industry Predictions for 2014

If Gartner, Inc.'s newest lineup of vertical industry predictions is on target, then most industries are in for a period of accelerated pressures, fundamental change, and the need to either embrace digitalization or lose their competitive edges. In Top Industries Predicts 2014: The Pressure for Fundamental Transformation Continues to Accelerate, Gartner highlights a dozen strategic planning assumptions that CIOs, senior business executives, and IT leaders should factor into their enterprise planning and strategy-setting initiatives.

Among Gartner's predictions was the fact that by 2016, poor return on equity will drive more than 60 percent of banks worldwide to process the majority of their transactions in the cloud. A similar movement is taking place across other industries as more firms tap into the cloud over licensed software installations.

Judging by recent announcements from Microsoft, the company's plans, including in the Dynamics business, continue to focus on address the same trends.

In October, Microsoft introduced a "fall wave of enterprise cloud solutions" that included upcoming releases of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, a new Windows Azure Pack that runs on top of Server and System Center, Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, Windows Azure HDInsight Service, Windows Intune, and a second preview of SQL Server 2014. And just this week, Microsoft revealed that its flagship ERP solution, Dynamics AX, will begin supporting public cloud infrastructure usage (Azure) in the AX 2012 R3 release in April 2014, and in a SaaS public cloud deployment model with the next major version, "Rainier", sometime closer to 2015.

Gartner also predicts that by year-end 2017, at least seven of the world's top 10 multichannel retailers will use 3...