Trends in Technology 2010

Below are 8 trends that are sure to catch the fancy of IT world. While the full impact of these trends may not appear this year, but executives need to act now so that they can exploit the trends for their competitive advantage

Trend 1- Business Continuity responsibility

• The onus will lie on the senior management to ensure that there is no ambiguity in the ownership of responsibility of a BCP. There would be a dedicated team for ensuring business continuity. This team should have representatives from all the critical functions. Senior management must bestow the responsibility for business continuity with the business and not any of the support functions.

Trend 2- Cloud computing purchase

• The actual purchase of cloud-based services has an interesting trend lined up . On the face of it, using pay-as-you-go IT services should be highly attractive from a procurement standpoint, moving payment and authorization processes from capital expenditure to operating costs. The procurement of cloud computing, and the whole concept of what an enterprise agreement looks like in a cloud environment, are sticking points that will need to be looked at in future.

Trend 3- Content management

• Storage and the network bandwidth to store and access information is growing much faster than computing causing an explosion in content creation. This will make content management one of the most important information technologies and new technologies will emerge to automatically find, organize, verify and visualize content.Content and content management will increasingly be delivered in two main forms - appliances and on-line services. Extremely simple, purpose-built physical appliances for household and office use will capture and organize documents, photos, music and video. Software appliances, configured as virtual machines for specific tasks, will be downloaded from the internet to generic hardware that will come in sizes Small, Medium or Large.

Trend 4- Mash-up technology
• On-line collaborative and content services will extend from Web 2.0 to the community developing sites and user experience with open source accelerating their rate of evolution. Mash-up technology will replace web services and will blur services as it blends internal and external services. Services will start to spill over into the physical world as shops and delivery become more integrated into requests from the internet
Trend 5- Mobile computing and communication
• Business computing will shift significantly from PCs to mobile devices as Blackberry-size devices capture more business activities and form factors improve. Ubiquitous internet access and informality espoused by blogs and instant messaging will lead to simpler forms of communication. Content will be consumed on something probably closer to a Playstation Portable and your very thin mobile phone
Trend 6- Soft design
• A new revolution in user interface design is just beginning as designers move from physical to soft design. Gesture control will make its way into handheld and notepad devices. User interfaces will move from 2D to 3D as gamers influence work habits and we may see the first holographic interfaces. Avatars will begin to replace dialogs as the request-response metaphor and we may see practical voice recognition and language understanding.
Trend 7- IT infrastructure as service
• By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service. Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it practical to locate infrastructure at other sites and still receive the same response times. Enterprises believe that as service oriented architecture (SOA) becomes common, “cloud computing” will take off, thus untying applications from specific infrastructure. This trend to accepting commodity infrastructure could end the traditional “lock-in” with a single supplier and lower the costs of switching suppliers. It means that IT buyers should strengthen their purchasing and sourcing departments to evaluate offerings. They will have to develop and use new criteria for evaluation and selection and phase out traditional criteria
Trend 8- Green sourcing
• By 2011, suppliers to large global enterprises will need to prove their green credentials via an audited process to retain preferred supplier status. Those organizations with strong brands are helping to forge the first wave of green sourcing policies and initiatives. These policies go well beyond minimizing direct carbon emissions or requiring suppliers to comply with local environmental regulations. For example, Timberland has launched a “Green Index” environmental rating for its shoes and boots. Home Depot is working on evaluation and audit criteria for assessing supplier submissions for its new EcoOptions product line.

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