Today's enterprise business technologies are offering interesting perspectives to Gen X and Gen Y consumers, and are becoming a melting pot of best of breed technologies. "Uberification" of consumer applications is at its peak with an ever-growing inventory of mobile apps that are taking over day-to-day needs of the consumer. Brick and Mortar businesses have already conceded or are reinventing themselves to blend virtual and real-life combinations via embedded virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Smart enterprises have already begun to capitalize on consumer technology trends initiated by Gen Y (or Millennials) and accelerated by the business acumen of Gen X. It is indeed a great time to be in the midst of these massive do-overs of enterprise business technologies. Cloud adoption has been a strategic initiative for enterprises irrespective of whether they are global or "glocal". Cloud Computing via multiple combinations of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) are being adopted at a rapid scale. Gone are the days when enterprises used to plan for 3 to 5 year roadmaps to expand, improve, and optimize their data centers. Consolidation across various infrastructure, storage, and network vendors has proven that dedicated data centers for each enterprise are outdated. Large enterprise software houses have realized this and have increased their pace in cloud offerings to be relevant amongst cloud-only vendors.

With ever increasing adoption of mobile apps, from door delivery to maid service to even home laundry service, with the click of a button, Millennials are now more tuned towards self-service for enterprise applications. Employees are now learning unique IT troubleshooting skills, thus minimizing and/or (to an extent) eliminating the need for a dedicated IT helpdesk. To be agile, executives and decision makers have started to demand workflow approval engines that are not tied to specific software or business tracks. Universal worklists similar to news aggregation services are taking shape allowing tasks to be presented for approvers to review/validate and consent/ deny business transactions. With heterogeneous application portfolios being a reality for everyone, it is imperative that business leaders don't want to login to multiple applications to review/validate and approve each to-do list. It would be not surprising to see enterprise digital assistant products in the near future, handling our digital desk to initiate and perform business transactions to reduce wait time and cycle time.

The Office of the CIO for all size enterprises have been rebranding themselves as the Chief Innovation Office as IT is being mandated to reinvent itself to be a profit center as compared to traditional cost center models. To be relevant, IT is expected to lead the way in harnessing big data analytics and convert information into powerful tools for agile decision making. Traditional IT is going through a rapid makeover with almost all emerging cloud technologies creating an enhanced workforce that has multiple DevOps skillsets for reducing cycle time and increasing agility.

Robert Noyce once said, "Innovation is everything, when you're on the forefront, you can see what the next innovation needs to be. When you're behind, you have to spend your energy catching up." With rapid globalization and the information revolution, it is now a survival necessity for enterprises to adopt and adept to change.