In 2012 it has become clear that the ‘consumerisation of IT’ trend is no longer just changing the workplace culture of startups and small businesses.

Big companies, from a wide range of industries, are now leaping into the cloud and all that it offers.

Big businesses in a broad range of industries are moving to cloud-based tools because they facilitate more mobile, social and collaborative styles of work.

These businesses have realised that they need to be more global and move much faster, and that the best way to do this is to work in the cloud.

What’s next for 2013? What sort of technology trends can we look forward to?

In addition to the continued momentum of cloud, mobile and social technologies in the workplace, two other major trends we expect to see more of, are an increased use of geospatial data and big data set crunching for more strategic decision making.

Both of these technologies are now more accessible from a cost and a usability perspective.

Previously, geospatial analysis was an often expensive and highly specialised area — there were normally only one or two people within organisations that knew how to use the systems.

Now basically anyone who knows how to use mapping devices can use these tools, allowing companies from real estate to retailers to utilities to media to better use location based information in making business decisions.

Similarly, businesses can now also find patterns in large data sets quickly, create new analytics products and build business analysis tools.

Doug Farber, MD, Enterprise APAC, Google