From fascination to illumination

Although a slightly old post, but here is an interesting article by Gartner on the 2009 Stratgic Technologies. A motivation to relook at this Oct, 2008 vision a quarter later reveals the accuracy of the vision.

2009 began with a downturn economy and sales strategy focusing on fixing things, a rather reactive approach but in the world of information technology, things are getting better. Lots of convergence, huge strides in maturity, increase in motivation and an aggressive roadmap.

Gartner presents the top 10 Strategic Technologies enlisted here:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Beyond Blade Servers
Green IT
Web Oriented Architectures
Enterprsie Mashups 2.0
Specialised Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence

My understanding of the list actually streams Gartner’s choices into three:

Infrastructure
NextGen Applications
Business Intelligence

Infrasructure:
Virtualization is a massive stride forward in server consoildation and to an extent lowering licensing costs of software for organisations. As the usage of virtualization increases within companies, the need for virtualization management and security has increased. Enterprises already at a mature state of virtualization will further focus on collaboration of their virtual platforms with existing physical infrastrcture, more invisibility of virtualization on networks and capabiliites to take snapshots for cloning physical servers arrangements and configurations including software.
Pain points for the year will be virtualization security as the need for bringing virtualization into mainstream environments will reveal aspects of security specific to this line of technology.

Cloud Computing will further SaaS models and the business model’s appeal will increase in emerging markets like the Middle East and the Far East. This is coupled by the reason of increased investments in telecommunication backbones and greater awareness of outsourcing IT maintaince to service providers offering services on the cloud.
However, there are many pain points ranging from raising costs of telecom and sporadic skepticm in TCO of the SaaS business model in markets like the Middle East. Pain points remain the height of exceeding expacations and lack of best practices to adopt for most organizations.

Green IT and Blade dissappearance can be duly served by the changing trends in the software consupmtion behavior from products to services) where service providers determine these initiatives. However, Green IT  will not be adopted widely during this continued recession phase.

Next Gen Apps:
SOA is reaching its plateau of productivity on the Gartner’s Hype Cycle and will further enterprise mashups. This technology has already given a direction to evolve web standards and architectures influenced a wider range of application connectivity leading to benefits harnessed by other technologies and applications including social networking applications, collaboration and business intelligence. However, with the emerging trends of converged networks, pervasive computing applications including location aware, embedded systems will increase as well. Companies already having a level of this will continue to invest in application semantics using BPM automation, service orchestrations and semantic web services. Certain vendors have already started to bring forward their product offerings in these areas.

Business Intelligence:
It is prime time for BI to flourish, already aggressively growing in 2007 and 2008 according to both Gartner and TDWI, BI makes its justifaction for greater compliance, visibility, transparency, something whcih the post-recession period demands. This period also serves the motivation for organsiations to focus on their performance management. Business Intelligence offerings has a wider portfolio to offer this year with many vendors offering (or acquiring) data management appliances including Teradata, Greenplum, Microsoft etc. Last year vendor consolidation has brought greater strength to individual portfolio of each BI provider. SaaS models are also avaiable as alternatives giving customers much flexibility and even possiblity to mature their BI initiatives. Costs of implmementing Business Intelligence will go down for organisations with experience in consuming SaaS and those ready to invest in open source BI which has reached impressive maturity.
However, Predictive Analytics is still to go mainstream this year but is a probable reality in coming years.