Nucleus Research, a consulting firm, has released its list of top 10 tech trends for 2012. Why read it? Because within these trends are the hints you need to figure out where tech job growth is most likely to occur. Which of these trends resonate most with you? The Productive Enterprise: “Spurred on by the adoption of Facebook, many enterprise software vendors have clamored to add 'social' capabilities to their applications. Nucleus’s analysis has found integrating capabilities like Chatter can drive an average productivity increase of 20 percent.” The Cloud Changes Development: “First, the cloud made development faster. In fact, last year Nucleus found Force.com development was 4.9 times faster than traditional development. Then, the cloud made development more iterative. When changes can be made on the fly, companies can deploy once and then adapt an application as business needs change or become clearer.” SAP Reemerges: “SAP revenues have gone up and the company has introduced innovations in areas like mobile device access. We’ve started to see real traction with Business By Design. This is partly because customers that have growth aspirations are also risk averse given the economy: They want to put in business-class financial controls earlier rather than later.” Users Choose Big over Best of Breed: “As acquisitions continue to extend the stack of IBM and Oracle, technology buyers large and small will increasingly look to a big vendor with an 80 percent solution versus a best-of-breed application that must be managed, integrated, and negotiated separately.” More Ways for All to Manage Big Data: “Although big data has definitely been over-hyped, companies will soon make smarter decisions by using analytics to comb through huge amounts of data. Instead of making hypotheses, performing analyses and reaching conclusions that are often wrong, regular business users can use data visualization tools such as TIBCO Spotfire to gain a quick understanding of where decision drivers lie in large data sets.” Capital Moves From Labor to Technology: “The unemployment rate will continue to hover near 10 percent. Although companies have lots of reasons not to hire, including politicians’ inability to shrink the government, one of the biggest reasons not to hire is technology. When companies do have money to spend, their two main choices are technology and people. A recent Nucleus survey found technology is winning hands down, with 50 percent of US companies planning to increase their technology spend in 2012.” The Decade of Smarter Software: “The last decade was about adding features and functionality to software. The next decade will be about making software more intuitive, integrated, and self teaching so it makes individual end users more productive.” Labor Finally Gets Optimized: “Workforce management vendors have always bragged that their scheduling applications help organizations put the right people in the right place at the right time. Even when this was true, it was based on limited data sets, such as which employees were available and their certifications. Workforce management vendors such as Dayforce and Kaba are now delivering this data to managers by combining analytics tools with data gathered at time and attendance kiosks.” Healthcare Investment: “Government incentives to physicians and hospitals to move patient data out of paper files and into electronic health records will drive investment in data capture devices and services and electronic records management applications.” Renewed Focus on the Customer Experience: “Nucleus continues to see strong investment in CRM and related applications, as companies seek to retain their most profitable customers and attract new ones. Many companies are still struggling to optimize customer experiences while creating their presence in a virtual world–and encouraging customers to friend you on Facebook is not enough. Savvy marketers recognize that every customer interaction is an opportunity to gain – or lose – business.”