What an exciting time to be in the tech industry. We are at the beginning of a major transition to the Mobile-Cloud era. Trends like bring your own device (BYOD), access anywhere, virtualization, and machine-to-machine connections have given way to a new breed of applications. We estimate that approximately 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020. In 2010 alone, more than 350, 000 applications were developed with more than three million downloads. A 44-fold increase in data creation is predicted from 2010 to 2020, with 34 percent of it in the cloud. All of this leads to a world of intuitive connections between people, processes, data and things on the network -the Internet of Everything.

What does this mean?

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It means the trends we've been discussing over the past several years are all having a cumulative effect putting new demands on IT.

For example, the mobile consumer is turning the traditional enterprise upside down, forcing IT departments to deliver against anexperience differentialwith stagnant, and even decreasing budgets. Employees are looking to consume, create, and share information in business like they do in their personal lives -seamlessly through the cloud.

The onus is on IT to make applications available anytime, anywhere for employees and allow businesses to move with greater agility and speed. The goal is to free the business from the constraints of legacy infrastructure and move to a world of anything delivered "as a service". This creates avelocity differentialrequiring a shift to services delivered from the cloud.

The proliferation of connected devices, sensors, and other context-aware "things" results in an explosion of data. And IT departments will need to contend with people-to-people connections, people-to-machine, and machine-to-machine connections, resulting in adata differential. Only those organizations that adapt their business processes in order to analyze all that data and transform it into actionable information will reap the rewards.

It's easy for those of us who live and breathe technology to be captivated by enabling the Internet of Everything, and on working out the massive implications on the future of information technology. But it's also important to highlight the human outcomes of this technology phenomenon. The true value of Internet of Everything resides in its ability to fuel better, more informed business decisions, create unprecedented economic opportunity, enable richer experiences, and improve lives. While we're seeing an incredible growth in IP-enabled devices, sensors and other context-aware machines, all those connections -even machine-to-machine connections -ultimately serve to benefit humanity.