‘Tis the season of tech predictions for next year. Right on cue, tech PR people roll out their trusty (if tired) prediction pitches: lists of what trends, technologies and products are expected to be hot, guided by the expertise (and often influenced by the product offerings) of clients. Similarly, reporters, bloggers and analysts issue their forecasts.
I saw a bunch of these types of articles this week and thought I would do this roundup.
One of the articles I cited in my last post (the WSJ story IT Spending Seen Decelarating) mentioned a Gartner report and quoted one of their analysts as follows:
Software as a service, or on-demand software, and virtualization
technologies, which help companies reduce capital expenditures on IT
projects, are likely to benefit
InfoWorld’s Lisa Schmeier also focused on economic factors in her piece Recession Proof IT Jobs. She cited a report from recruitment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas that predicted strong demand for IT jobs related to the following technologies:
- Virtualization
- VoIP and wireless technologies
- Systems upgrade and maintenance
- Web 2.0 technologies (especially AJAX and Ruby on Rails skills)
On SYS-CON’s AjaxWorld News Desk, James Hamilton cited Lisa’s article in his piece Gartner’s Top 10 List is Incorrect and Stupid (I thank my colleague Heather Lukens for pointing both of these out to me). He predicts good things for the following:
- Virtualization
- Cloud computing
- SOA (in its reincarnation as Web Oriented Architecture)
James takes issue with Gartner’s list:
Gartner’s Top 10 list is incorrect and stupid to include “Enterprise Mashups” and “Social Software and Social Networking” among the top 10 technologies for 2009.
Are they talking about new recession priorities in IT departments of businesses or unemployed sexual predator priorities?
I can’t imagine a single company today having a spare team of programmers sitting bored in a room with nothing better to do than implement a “social computing” module to their corporate website, or my favorite, “enterprise mashups” for their management team.
I am sure there are those who would argue that social technologies are providing real benefits for organizations and will continue to grow.
It is also no secret that in order to thrive businesses need to embrace the latest developments in technology. It will therefore be interesting to see what the future holds for business technology.
Jim Rapoza took a contrarian approach in the Emerging Technologies article: Tech Most Likely to be Ignored in 2009.
(This article offers a counterbalance to his earlier piece Technology in 2009 – you will need to register to get this – in which he predicts the following will be big in 2009:
- Cloud computing
- Next generation Web platforms
- Open mobile platforms
- Semantic search)
He writes:
While sexy and heavily hyped technologies [like social networking] get a lot of attention, they often aren’t addressing a serious problem, especially for enterprises. Given the current economic situation, vendors should really be looking at innovating in the areas that companies have to spend on, instead of shiny new toy technologies that most businesses will decide they can easily live without.
Jim goes on to explain why the following should not be ignored:
- Security (What we need is a Security 2.0 type of wave, a radical rethink of how companies protect their systems and data and stop the bad guys in their tracks)
- PC hardware (Some major company needs to scrap the entire motherboard, processor, memory and hard disk paradigm and get to work on the future of computing)
- Internet Infrastructure (… when was the last time there was an important and innovative new web server release? Or a massive change in the way servers do anything on the Web?)
