Valentin's Blog: January 2009

Despite all the perils of predictions - I do like spending a few hours reading and thinking about what the next year may bring for information technology. I wanted to share the result with you: my personal synthesis of IT predictions from 67 people and organizations.

Over-Clouded

Cloud Computing is mentioned by so many people that - if nothing else - it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy [5,6,7,9, 10,30,31,34,36,40,44,60,62,65,66,67]. The buzz includes the whole range of cloud techniques and related buzzwords - internal clouds, external clouds, SAAS, IAAS, PAAS and (to a lesser extend) personal clouds a la MobileMe. One interesting aspect is that the current recession may even be fueling this enthusiasm, because it makes the promised cost savings as well as the pay-per-use model seem so much more attractive [8,9,10,66]. On a cautionary note some predictions stressed the need for open standards to make different cloud providers interoperable [5,44], the challenging governance and regulatory issues involved [62,65,67] and the limits of 'internal clouds' [31].

Regaining Control: Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC)

Fueled by the uncertainties of Cloud Computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, new regulations to be expected in the wake of the current financial crisis and finally the string of high profile data spills in 2008, many expect a resurgent interest in GRC [8,9,32,35,61,62,64,65,67]. Keywords in this area were Enterprise Digital Rights Management [61], e-Discovery [32] and Policy Language Interoperability [35].

Oh, you also shop here?

Many predictions address social media for the enterprise and Enterprise2.0 technologies [7,14,16,28,28,32,33,46,47,49,51,52,53,54,55,56,75,60,63]. The largest number of predictions addressed the use of social media in the B2C/B2B area for customer service [36,47,54,56], marketing [16,28,33,49] and shopping [40,53] (as opposed to the internal use for e.g. knowledge management).

The most mentioned application was Twitter, but predictions varied widely on where it may be heading: people predict it will gain more legitimacy [54,28], but also that it will lose influence after it has peaked in 2008 [26]. One predicted Twitter will be acquired by Google [50]; another that it will stay independent [33].

Interestingly four predictions addressed and predicted a rise in the fragmentation in IT architecture and IT budget that can occur particularly in the Enterprise 2.0 context - the keywords are 'Bricolage IT' [64], 'Shadow IT' [10], 'Rogue Clouds' [5] and the possible backlash of 'Anti-IT' and 'Slow-IT' [2].

Saving the Environment (and Money)

Green IT - meaning both the use of energy efficient computer systems as well as the use of IT to save energy elsewhere (think 'smart meters','smart buildings', 'smart grid' or teleconferencing instead of air travel) - seems to be another idea whose time has come: the environment is not going to go away as a topic, hardware vendors have green products ready, possible cost saving sound particular tempting in a recession and anti-recession government spending for infrastructure may finance some Green-IT projects [1,29,36,37,62]. IBM was mentioned as one company placed particularly well to profit from an increased interest in 'Smart Infrastructure' [29]. Green IT was the only IT-centric topic with an own article in the Economist's special issue 'The World in 2009' [1].

BI for everyone

Business Intelligence was one buzzword that appeared in a few predictions, most notable in those from Gardner and Forrester Research [6,9,10,31]. People are expecting Business Intelligence techniques to improve to handle very large amounts of data [10] and to become easier to use for end users [6,9]. BI was also mentioned as the next area to be 'SaaS-ified' [31] and the W3C staff predicted great advances in easy to use data visualization [35], surely something that could improve BI solutions.

'Change' coming to eGovernment

The very effective use of social media by the Obama campaign was surely not lost to politicians in Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Parliament, India, Indonesia, South Africa and even Iran - all preparing for federal elections in 2009. Also the tech-savvy Obama administration is surely going to continue its use of modern technology - all in all it seems 2009 will see a great increase in the use of modern IT (in particular social media) in government and politics in general [29,35,53]. Here I include electronic health records - which seem sure to get a big boost from the incoming Obama administration [1].

The Web: Identity, Video, Location, Live Web and Ads for the world

Identity and its portability continues to be an important problem that may see solutions emerge in 2009 [15,17,18,34,48,57]; in this context Facebook Connect was identified as 2009's shiny must-have for modern websites [57].

Online video is the main area that is expected to grow in 2009 [24,25,34,54], another area that may profit from the recession as consumers seek cheap thrills [24]. Also mentioned is an increasing interest in geocoded websites, geolocation and collaborative mapping [13,35,57]. Finally four predictions spoke about the live web, predicting 'Google Maps Live' [59], 'Live RSS' [58] and a more prominent role for the live web in general [33,52].

As for the ads fueling the development of the web: The Economist expects Internet ads to remain strong and to continue to increase their share of all marketing spending [1]. The economist also expects e-commerce to continue to grow even in a recession. There were also some predictions about getting serious about monetizing non-us traffic [22,24].

Too many friends, too much information

Dealing with information overload was another topic that appeared in many predictions. This lead to people predicting "Deliberately Disconnected" [64], "De-friending" [57], 'Social Media Indigestion' [47] and 'Social Graph Shrinkage [53] as trends; better information filtering [62,29,12] and intelligent Internet agents [29,39] were also proposed as emerging remedies.

The Mobile Web: Software, Location and Netbooks

With so many great smartphones entering the market, laptops for the first time outselling desktops and netbooks establishing a whole new category of computing devices, it is no surprise that mobility and the mobile web appear in many predictions [1,12,14,26,36,39,43,52]. Most excitement surrounded netbooks driving the development of servers, clouds and Linux clients [36,39,43] and a possible transformation of the software market through mobile software and mobile app stores [26,39,52]. Other predictions were: location aware services on mobile devices [12,14], the large scale IPhone adoption in enterprises [43] and mobile marketing (finally) taking of [51]. I personally also expect energy to be a big topic in the mobile area with both 'wireless energy' and - to a lesser extends - 'energy scavenging' entering the mainstream vocabulary.

Hardware: HDD and GPU looking for new jobs

2009 is predicted to be the year of the SSD/flash drive for both consumers and the enterprise [26,30,39,45], with HDD's starting to look for new application areas (home-SAN and home backup systems anyone?). Graphic cards will continue their development but will (again) increasingly be used for the computation of 3D outputs (Stereo3D [45]), physical simulations (physX [45]) and just general purpose computation tasks (GPGPU [30]). The processor of the year 2009 will be the Intel Core i7 while AMD will start to sell 6 core processors [45]. I want to add that we will also see dual-core processors appear in smartphones.

Did I miss anything important? Tell me in the comments!

Sources

The sources were selected by Google - in essence these are the top ranking results for a search for IT predictions 2009. Note that some links contain predictions from more than one person and are hence referenced multiple times.

Valentin's Blog

January 9, 2009

The Year of the Cloud - a Synthesis of 67 IT Predictions for 2009

Over-Clouded

Regaining Control: Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC)

Oh, you also shop here?

Saving the Environment (and Money)

BI for everyone

'Change' coming to eGovernment

The Web: Identity, Video, Location, Live Web and Ads for the world

Too many friends, too much information

The Mobile Web: Software, Location and Netbooks

Hardware: HDD and GPU looking for new jobs

Sources

January 7, 2009

CfP - Social Aspects of the Web

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