Technology 2009

I was reading blogs, reports, websites and other news article and was wondering what will be the hot technology areas for the Information Technology. During this economic downturn how research companies, development companies will be strategizing and aligning their business accordingly. Some of my understandings are here, of course the credit goes to all the authors and their articles on this: Technology focus 2009 1. Unified communication 2. Virtualization 3. Integration and Collaboration 4. Business Analytics and Business Process management 5. Cloud computing Due to the slow down, it is difficult to predict about the spending pattern of the organization for their IT, some organizations are reviewing their budget they made for 2009 during 2008, some of them are scaling down, some of them shifted to sustenance mode so they will spend what is essential. Let us call it restructuring, layoff, optimizing, downsizing whatever it may – we need to accept that there is a change and the change is everywhere.

Unified communication – like last few years, this going to be still in race. We will see more coming. The blend of telephony and computing – helping millions across the globe to converse. Let us also see this as a good cost cut model - prefer video conferencing, tele conferencing instead of international travel.

Virtualization – In my view another cost cut technique, optimized resource utilization technique. Now literally virtualizing everything.

Integration and Collaboration : tools for integration and collaboration a good sizable number for this year. Online communities, online collaboration sites,
SAAS – sure to be considered before thinking of any internet application development. Developers believe that this is going to be more in this year than what it was in the past year. So subscription based business on internet lives here but how long is definite question??? What happened to ASP? Will it happen to SAAS? What is the next incarnation of Service? Lot of questions unfold here.

Fine, future seems to be more of “Open source”, organizations want to encourage open source applications/products. This will reduce the complexity involved in licensing, relying on one provider/technology expert. Significantly this is growing. Though all of them will not jump to open source immediately on one day, but aligning them and equipping them seems to be inevitable.

Business analytics – though we have already tools/applications available in the market, this area seems to be hot cake for upcoming years. Score cards, Performance Management system/Server, BAM, BPM are the mantras.

Cloud computing – yes reports indicate organization will try various forms of this during this year.