Cloud computing evangelists have been pronouncing the death of the PC for years; now Gartner, the world’s leading IT research firm, has weighed in on the issue with a new report that predicts personal cloud services will replace the traditional PC as the dominant form of business computing by 2014, Digital Trends reports. Although that date seems a bit hasty given how long large scale IT changes typically take in the corporate world, Gartner analysts identified five “megatrends” that they predict will come together and lead to the rapid adoption of the cloud in business. Among them: The consumerization of tech, virtualization, and a dramatic increase in user mobility.
“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, according to a press release. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”