Plan for 2010 with these four technology trends
An important part of effective corporate planning is anticipating technology trends and
taking advantage of them before they happen. In order to assist CIOs and
technology managers with future planning, I offer my top four predictions of
major technology trends in 2010 and how organizations should prepare to take advantage of them.
No. 1: Web services become the dominant integration platform
Web services are the right thread at the right time. Although security concerns will keep
Web services from becoming a dominant Internet or extranet integration platform, they are
mature and secure enough for corporations to start using "inside the firewall."
Corporations will use Web services to develop internal portals and content management
tools. Their ability to use any technology to wrap existing systems and then expose them
as standard, HTTP-addressable objects makes Web services an ideal choice for portals.
Companies will also use Web services as a standard way to expose information for internal
reporting systems and data warehousing projects—and, subsequently, as inputs to
corporate portals and content management systems. Given the high cost of industry portal
and content management systems, companies will opt to "roll their own" rather
than buy new licenses. This means a down year—and possibly even the
extinction—for companies such as Plumtree and Vignette. And Microsoft will have to
find a new way to promote and sell its portal (SharePoint Portal Server) and content
management system (MS-CMS 2002) when corporate accounts opt to build their own using the
Visual Studio .NET development platform.
No. 2: Wireless connectivity goes mainstream
By the end of 2010, you’ll hardly be able to walk into a coffee shop, library,
bookstore, airport, or hotel that doesn’t provide wireless Internet connectivity
using the 802.11b standard. The IBM/AT&T wireless initiative and the emergence of
national bandwidth-sharing arrangements between regional players and big players like TMobile will give organizations the choice of many different partners for wireless
services. In addition to the wireless facilities in public locations, many companies will
give their guests non-WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol), Internet-only access based on
the 802.11b standard, while employees will have 802.11b or 802.11a (54 MB) access to the
full network using 128-bit encryption and WEP.
Corporations should be planning for 802.11b remote access. Corporate planners should make
sure that their networks will be able to support wireless connectivity before they
purchase new laptops or PDAs. Corporate systems such as portals, electronic mail systems,
and Web sites will need to be able to support wireless access from both laptops and PDAs.
The combination of high speed, periodically connected access, and rich clients, such as
laptop PCs, Tablet PCs, and programmable PDAs, may eliminate the need for the 3G networks
that cell phone companies have been promising for years. Even after the 3G networks are
finally delivered, the per-minute costs to use applications on these platforms will be
much higher than the cost of using a combination of smart devices and synchronization.
No. 3: Portable video devices gain popularity
Like the MP3 players before them, new video players will let consumers carry around their
favorite videos with them. Rather than a heavy, battery-chewing DVD player with a video
screen, these new devices will use SD cards, CF cards, or memory sticks to hold video in
MPEG 4 or Windows Media Player files. Companies such as ReplayTV and TiVo will have to
find ways to let consumers move video recordings to these formats, or they’ll open
the doors of the lucrative PVR (Personal Video Recorder) market to competitors like
Microsoft and its Media PC. Widespread distribution of this technology will give
corporations some new options for training salespeople, partners, and customers.
If you have major technology initiatives that require a large capital
expenditure, you should move them as late in 2010 as possible in order to have the best chance of making
them happen in the year.
