Tech Manager

Well, it's that time again, time for my Predictions for the new year.

I did pretty well on my 2008 predictions, but was wrong on 2 different counts. I predicted continued Growth in SOA and that did not happen, and I also predicted that VISTA would become a favorable choice for desktops after the first service pack shipped, and that did not happen. However, I was close on all other predictions which you can find here.

So here are my predictions of 2009:

1)   Cloud Computing

The maturing of Cloud Computing Market will continue and will lead to better definition of Cloud Products and Services. We already see this distinction in the vendor space where vendors have started to label their Cloud activities as Infrastructure Clouds, Platform Clouds, SAAS Clouds, Server Clouds and Scale-out Clouds.

Adoption of cloud technologies will continue to grow and I predict that we will see advances in Secure Networking and VPN like solutions between the Cloud vendors and the Enterprise.  I also think that we will see improvements in Relational Database offerings in the cloud. Enterprises are very familiar with relational database technology and with little to no adoption in the cloud, both cloud and database vendors will see this as an opportunity.

IT in large enterprises will start experimenting with cloud technology both inside and outside of the firewall, and will be forced to start evaluating the feasibility of cloud solutions by the Business folks looking to work through their long list of projects and service requests.

2)  The Move Toward Openness

IT as we know it is changing and will continue to adopt Open Technologies, especially when presented with real Open Source support models for their production environments. Support plans are the revenue engine of Open Source companies, and I predict that we will see more and more companies utilize open technologies. I also think we could see a large vendor like Cisco or IBM getting behind the Open Web / Open Stack and offer a support model for Open Stack solutions.

With more and more open solutions, proprietary vendors will be forced to start offering open API's or API's that will allow access to some of their data. This will help to extend proprietary services and allow them to compete with Open Source Solutions. 

3)   Mobile Connectivity

All phones will continue to evolve and adopt new features. I predict that all low cost phones will start to have WiFi capability and Smart Phones will be offer more features like access to a real keyboard, improved battery life, and more Enterprises will begin delivering Mobile web sites suitable for mobile clients.

 Smart Phones will be the norm for anyone that needs to stay connected.

4)  Social Media and Social Networking

Social Networking features and options will continue to grow in the first half of 2009 but the Social BUZZ will fade in the second half of 2009. Tools to integrate and  aggregate Social Data will do well in 2009 and I think these Social Tools will become part of the feature sets of blogs, aggregators and communication devices.

MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, FriendFeed and Twitter will continue to grow and evolve. Twitter will find a revenue model, possibly advertising with a Professional Account offering that does not include advertising.

Social adoption will continue to rise, even after the buzz dies down and access to Social Data will end up integrated in our day to day life.

5)   Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 features and tools will be around for a long time, however the buzz is gone from both, and instead, the feature sets have been rolled into the Social Media bandwagon. This is both good and bad for Enterprises. It is good because more Corporate folks are starting to understand Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 features and benefits, however it is bad because there are few products available that integrate well and can be used both in front of and behind the corporate firewall.

I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 becoming feature sets in new products and services in the Enterprise, however they will not become feature sets in all Enterprise products.

6)  Web Services

As IT organizations develop new and or replace older applications, they will continue to expand on Web Services solutions to delivery their applications. Web 2.0 taught us that the web is a platform and this platform will continue to grow and evolve. The introduction and adoption of cloud solutions, gives organizations more options and solutions to consider and I see this as a catalyst for Web Services.

With the adoption of Web Services and standard methods of pulling and pushing data, we will also see an increase in the number of small tools, widgets and client server like applications that will take advantage of web services and API's to access data.

However, I think that SOA as a universal infrastructure strategy is dead. I do think that some of the SOA tools and solutions like ESB's will continue to grow and gain adoption, however I see them used on a case by case basis and not as part of a larger Infrastructure deployment. The bubble has burst for SOA and vendors will start changing the names of their products and move away from the SOA term.

7)  Enterprise IT

As I said earlier, Enterprise IT is changing and has been for many years now. Do more with less is more than just a moto, it is a way of life in IT which has already made us lean and mean. Will there be cost cutting and belt tightening, yes, but will there be massive IT layoffs, I doubt it. However, we can expect to delay and push out our costly upgrades and large scale migrations thru the first half of 2009. Also, any large scale purchases plans will be put on hold as we assess the true impact of this downturn.

Many organizations will see the cost cutting benefit of moving their large scale Production Oracle Databases off of older costly Solaris servers onto newer quicker Linux servers. Another cost cutting measure will be to move as many non-critical applications to some sort of a cloud solution wether that is SAAS or some sort of hosted solution. Also, organizations familiar with virtualization and server consolidation will take advantage of virtual servers and organization not familiar with these technologies will look to the cloud.

IT organizations need to continue to adapt and offer low cost solutions to current business problems if they want to maintain the "do more for less" philosophy.

8)  Wild Predictions

• HP buys SUN
• Google buys Twitter
• Yahoo will not be sold
• Steve Jobs leaves Apple
• Android sales will be slow but steady.
• Microsoft will deliver a ZUNE phone which will be a flop.
• Many newspapers will go out of business or move completely to the Web.