Predictions for 2009  |   December 29, 2008  

For the last 4 years I've put out a blog entry of my predictions for the coming year - like most others do. Since this is a year where the world will be coming out of a financial crisis, I'll try to be a bit more conservative than in the past.

It this situation, the investments in technology can actually have more impact than at any other time, since your competitors may be in a purely cost cutting mode. In 2009 organizations must maintain a balance between the new/strategic and the immediate return, between operational cost-cutting and operational excellence. Anytime there is this level of conflict, the situation is ripe for innovation.

During this economic contraction, we'll see many folks leave the IT ranks, hopefully those with less valuable technologies - today's zealot is tomorrow's Luddite. This resource migration should set organizations up for the future and focus technology investments.

SaaS - This method has been building slowly and steadily, and is moving into the mainstream accelerated by the cuts in organizational capital budgets. 2009 will be the year the technology moves from the explorers and pioneers to the settlers, the big guys with deep pockets. I'd expect to see consolidation and deeper understanding of the SLAs that SaaS will require. SOA (which enables the integration of SaaS) will move beyond the hype phase and become just part of what IT does. Industry assemblies will become more common with an integrated set of tools (likely from various vendors) assembled to address the needs of a particular segment.

Cloud - Cloud is still in its infancy. Standards will develop in 2009 to help address the lock-in concerns. Service management of the cloud resources will be a key area of investment and a success factor. We'll likely see quite a bit of rain on the cloud computing parade - as well as an unending number of weather related analogies. This move back to timesharing is going to happen since the environments have become too complex for most organizations to develop their expertise. Cloud is another form of outsourcing.

Virtualization - The current trend to shift from distributed spending to centralized approaches will continue. All organizations should have virtualization activities in the works in 2009. Most still have a great deal of value they can derive from consolidating their systems. The level of discipline required may chaff some teams, but most will find it well worth the effort.

Green - The focus on Green IT will accelerate in 2009. The US market is behind the rest of the world. This delay should allow for investment to focus on areas that have worked in other parts of the world. The likely adoption of a "cap and trade" system in the US during the Obama administration will cause organizations to focus more seriously than they ever have before.

Open Source and vendor consolidation - The big players will continue their efforts to influence the open source market. Open source can be an innovation escape valve for companies, since the costs appear to be lower. There is risk to simply adopting an open source solution unless there is a strong commercial support structure behind it. If there isn't strong commercial support available, the company doing the adoption must be willing to invest heavily in developing their own expertise, and supporting the open source solution.

Social Computing - 2009 will be a year of turmoil in the social computing (web 2.0) space. Many of the technologies are in the valley of despair. The good news is that what emerges from the other side will be less "build it and they will come" and instead be much more results oriented. Whether it is blogging, virtual world adoption or other, even more abstract techniques, they will all be held to a higher standard in 2009.

Standards - This year will have resurgence around standards. Any approach that can show a proven track record and momentum will be taken more seriously. For example, ITIL already had momentum, and that will continue since it appears to address many of the concerns organizations have right now: increased reliability, value, visibility and control of what is going on.

Analytics - With the unlimited computing capabilities of Cloud and Moore's law, more computing resources will be applied to business analytics techniques. As pre-built tools (SaaS) become available for use, they will be integrated into more business more deeply than ever before. It will become more of a business issue than an IT issue.

Smaller PCs - On a more personal technology note, we're going to see a decrease in the power of laptops. Less is more, as SaaS and cloud take on more of the heavy lifting, our shoulders can carry less. PDAs are taking on more of the workload. We've seen the first few lightweight PC models that are more stylish than functional. That may be OK, since people are beginning to realize that "just enough" is still enough.

Charlie Bess
EDS' Next Big Thing Blog