Tech predictions 2011 - more cloud, tablets and - hopefully - more efficiency
The shape of things to come
By Danny Bradbury
February 25, 2011
February 25, 2011
It’s time again for our annual look at the year ahead. We polled industry luminaries and asked for their best guesses on what 2011 will bring. Two overall trends emerged from those discussions. First, we noticed the public sector appearing repeatedly in pundits’ discussions of technology, inspired by the groundswell of Government 2.0 activity happening elsewhere in the world. This won government IT a category of its own.
Second, we saw a continuation in the overlap between predictions as, for example, the government’s interest in cloud computing could just as easily have fit in the cloud-computing category. And predictions about end-user devices, mobile computing and cloud repeatedly bled into each other as individual predictions spanned more than one area.
This trend is particularly telling. It shows that developments are converging and feeding off each other. In the dark old days of computing, one technology stream would often evolve independently. Servers, networking, endpoints and application strategies came into being without much interaction, but in 2011 and beyond we will see these developments rely on and kick off each other.
Government IT
2011 will see a greater uptake of open data
It’s happening everywhere else, so why shouldn’t it happen here? In the U.S. and the U.K., governments are opening up public sector data for others to use, so people can create applications designed to enhance government services and serve the public with government data. We’re already some of the way there in Canada, according to Microsoft Canada’s national technology officer John Weigelt. He pointed to initiatives such as the federal government’s Web 2.0 Practitioner’s (W2P) community, which encourages the development of collaborative Web 2.0 applications inside government. However, W2P itself is for government employees only.
Will we see more action to open up public data to external developers in 2011? Organizations like ChangeCamp, which promotes collaboration between technologists and civic government, are already anxious to get going. And it’s no coincidence that two of the top-ranking suggestions from the Canadian Government’s Consultation on the Digital Economy were: “open access to Canada’s public sector information and data” and “improved access to publicly funded data.”
There will be more government-wide projects to accelerate productivity and address out-of-date systems
Governments speak with many different voices, and they also compute with many different legacy platforms. This can lead to a mess when trying to unify public services and manage costs. Bernard Courtois, president and CEO of the Information Technology Association of Canada, said 2011 will be the year the government takes action and adopts a more holistic approach to its computing strategy.
“There will be a more enterprise-wide approach to computing and to applications like pay and human resources,” Courtois said. “Different governments are at a different level in applying organization-wide policies, but the auditor general has already told the federal government it needs a plan for this. We have applications running there that are 20 years old.
“Governments at all levels are aggressively pursuing deficit reductions, which will cause them to take a hard look at deficiencies. They’re also worried about the baby boomers reaching retirement.”
The first boomers officially begin retiring this year; what better time to start driving efficiencies into public operations?
Cloud computing will come to the fore
Cloud computing may be one way for government to quickly and effectively revitalize its computing infrastructure, said Lou Milrad, associate counsel at legal firm Miller Thomson. We have already seen the U.S. create Apps.gov, where federally approved cloud-computing services can be posted by the government for agency use. However, Milrad said the government will have to allay public fears about stewardship of sensitive citizen data first.
IT in business
Loosening financial markets and dollar parity will fuel tech investment
“The technology sector in Canada has had its ups and downs, to put it mildly,” said Catherine Swift, chair of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). “We’re expecting a better year for it in 2011.” Lack of financing for capital expenditure represented a big speed bump for technology investments when the world markets melted down, and a soaring U.S. dollar did nothing to help Canadian firms import technology. Now, however, things are picking up. In particular, dollar parity will help companies invest in technology again, much of which comes from the U.S.
“The [Canadian] dollar isn’t expected to fall any time soon. It’s tied closely to energy prices,” Swift said. “So now, people may say that they’re more likely to buy new technology. The challenge for smaller firms is to keep current.”
Productivity will again be a significant focus
Canadian productivity has taken a tumble. We rank 12th out of 17, according to the Conference Board of Canada. Courtois said a lack of aggression around high tech is part of the problem. “We have a productivity problem caused by underuse of digital technologies. I hear people raising that with the finance minister, just as I hear people in a whole range of industries raising this.”
Social networking applications will increasingly focus on specific objectives and requirements
We may have discovered social networking in the 2000s, but it was often seen as a workplace distraction. Pundits argue 2011 will be the year social networking grows up, as companies and consumers alike begin using it for more focused goals.
In the enterprise, social networking applications will manifest as social software, crafted for specific purposes. These could include internal applications designed to leverage employee knowledge to further business goals. “It’s how we are able to leverage collective intelligence to solve customer problems,” said Mukesh Gupta, director of strategic relations at Tata Consultancy Services.
However, it could also better identify customer behaviour, using hitherto unavailable data now revealed or collected within social applications as a means of targeting customers better. This will see social data married with traditional tools such as business analytics applications. “We will be able to predict behaviour using existing patterns in the system,” Gupta said.
Video will become ubiquitous
Networking giant Cisco is betting on the uptake of video. Drawing on data from carriers, it predicts that 90 per cent of Internet traffic will be video-based by 2013.
“IPTV in particular will have a big growth year,” said Dragan Nerandzic, CTO of Ericsson Canada, adding that the consumption of high-definition video will accelerate broadband rollouts. “We are going to the speeds that we need based on the types of video that we want to watch, and the types of video that we want to consume,” he said, predicting more fibre rollouts to the home.
Security threats will be increasingly sophisticated
CanSecWest security conference founder Dragos Ruiu warned that Canada is unprepared for a cybersecurity attack that could take down its critical infrastructure. Then Stuxnet happened. Look out for more as state-sponsored hackers up the ante in 2011, warns Andrew Jones, senior director of strategy and planning at Bell Canada.
“We are seeing advanced forms of malware. They will be more complex, and more rapidly changing, and it’s going to be very difficult for large firms and public sector organizations—except for the largest—to manage with confidence in those areas.”
Mobility
Increased competition will bring down costs and increase services
2010 saw the entrance of some key new players into the mobile market. Globalive and Orascom launched Wind Mobile, and Mobilicity also began offering services over its own HPDA network. With Shaw planning a late 2011 launch for its own regional wireless network, the CFIB’s Swift hopes to see prices continue to drop this year, even as functionality rises. It has still been a relatively short time since the new entrants hit the market, and there is plenty of room for the incumbents to make concessions.
“Trends lately have been positive in terms of the number of players in these markets, and that benefits the end user,” Swift said.
Secure mobile payments will increase substantially
Talk of using mobile phones as digital wallets has faded a little, following the initial fervour around the subject a few years ago. Nevertheless, the time is now right, said David Jacobson, a director in the consulting practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“It’s down to the vastly increased number of mobile smartphones in circulation and the ease with which you can choose and make purchases on a smartphone,” he said. “One of the ingredients there is price comparison and consulting with friends and so forth on social networks.”
Location-based services, social networking and easy mobile payment services such as Paypal will spur mobile phones to be mini-ecommerce devices, Jacobsen said. Social shopping sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, which both now have mobile phone apps, will serve to speed that development.
LTE will dominate new wireless cellular projects worldwide
No sooner have mobile carriers rolled out High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) networks than people are already talking about Long Term Evolution (LTE). “This is the first time in close to 30 years that one single technology will be accepted by operators large and small around the world,” said Ericsson’s Nerandzic.
But what of Canadian carriers that will want to leverage their recent HSPA deployments? They are still waiting for regulator approval, Nerandzic said. “Industry Canada will finalize the consultation process that will be applicable to LTE. That lies in the 700MHz frequency band. It will also relate to the end of analogue broadcast in Canada, which will be at the end of August 2011.”
Cloud computing
The natural symbiosis between the cloud and mobile devices will strengthen
Cloud computing makes mobile devices smarter. We have already seen examples of this with applications such as Google Goggles, which, among other functions, takes live video from a mobile phone and uses the almost limitless resources in the cloud to conduct visual searches on it. Google is also working on the next step: an embedded visual search system. The cloud’s ability to collect and collate large amounts of information makes it a perfect complement to mobile devices, and bringing the two together will create new experiences in areas such as augmented reality.
Privacy concerns, especially relating the cloud, will mount
Among the biggest problems for cloud computing is security and privacy. Miller Thomson’s Milrad said companies need to understand where sensitive data is being held and how it is being protected, to ensure they are not violating regulations.
Yet, the cloud is supposed to be opaque. The whole point is that we don’t have to worry about who is holding data where, including third parties under contract. How do we reconcile these issues? Vendors will continue researching that. HP, for example, has a team working on data governance in the cloud at its Bristol, U.K., research laboratory.
Machine-to-machine communications will be huge
Using the letter ‘M’ in tech talk, as in “m-commerce,” often means “mobile.”
“M will not be a synonym for mobility anymore. It will be a mark for machines,” Nerandzic said. More machi nes will connect to the cloud and they will be designed to speak directly to each other, rather than to us. Sensors in particular will be a big growth area in 2011, he said, pointing to Ericsson president and CEO Hans Vestberg’s prediction that there will be 50 billion connections by 2020. Everything from remote heart monitors to air quality sensors could be communicating with servers in the cloud as these deployments ramp up.
The majority of medium and large firms will be using the cloud or trying it before 2012
Only 18 per cent of organizations across 13 countries are using cloud computing right now, according to Cisco, but Bell’s Jones said this number will increase substantially. He expects most larger firms will jump on-board this year.
Not all clouds are created equal, however, he said. “For mid-sized and small firms it’s likely to be a public cloud,” but security and privacy concerns will drive larger players to retain some data in-house. These companies, however, will employ the same virtualization techniques as found in public cloud environments. “For a major bank or insurance firm, it …will look like a private or hybrid cloud.”
Cisco’s survey bears out his prediction; 88% of respondents predict they’ll be storing data in private or public clouds within three years.
End-user devices
Look for triple-digit growth in the Canadian tablet market
The iPad defined a new market category in 2010, and 2011 is already seeing a gaggle of vendors launch similar products. Canadian sales of tablets will grow by triple digits in 2011, said Krista Napier, senior analyst for Canadian emerging technology and digital media at IDC.
“A number of devices coming into the market will be around the iPad price point, but we do expect the price to come down. Customers are putting the price point closer to $400,” Napier said. We can also expect to see support for Flash on other devices, along with dual cameras, HDMI and USB ports. IDC expects the installed base of tablet devices in Canada to reach 1.5 million units.
We will see multiple end-user form factors
There was a time when the PC ruled the world but that’s changing, said Microsoft’s Weigelt. We can expect to see form factors proliferating in 2011, and tablets are only a part of that. “We’ll start to see TV sets as a first-class citizen on the Internet,” he said, adding that we’re moving away from the one-size-fits-all model of computing. “You’re not going to write a novel on your slate computer,” he said, and you probably won’t read one on your TV, either.
“The application developer and Web content developer now have to have form factors top of mind,” he said. Web sites and apps will need to take netbooks, laptops, desktops, slates, TVs, kiosks and smartphones into consideration. “In some cases some of the environments are very hardware-dependent. That is making life difficult for some developers.”
Ninety per cent of tablet users will be consumers, said IDC’s Napier, although they will also flourish in key verticals including retail, health care and education.
More mobile business users will move to thin-client computers
The IT industry is nothing if not cyclical. Jones’ prediction that many mobile business users will be thin-client users could be taken straight from 1993, when the idea of simple network-connected devices was all the rage. What’s different now, however, is that the Web has flourished and Google has produced an operating system designed purely for this environment. (Notebooks running Chrome OS go on sale in 2011.) “Many users and the majority of business travellers are going to ditch their laptops and exchange them for some kind of netbook, tablet or smartphone,” Jones said. Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, labelled “queen of the Internet,” supports this prediction. She said smartphones will outsell PCs in 2012.
Illustration: Gavin Orpen
In our February 2010 issue: Predictions 2010
Second, we saw a continuation in the overlap between predictions as, for example, the government’s interest in cloud computing could just as easily have fit in the cloud-computing category. And predictions about end-user devices, mobile computing and cloud repeatedly bled into each other as individual predictions spanned more than one area.
This trend is particularly telling. It shows that developments are converging and feeding off each other. In the dark old days of computing, one technology stream would often evolve independently. Servers, networking, endpoints and application strategies came into being without much interaction, but in 2011 and beyond we will see these developments rely on and kick off each other.
Government IT
2011 will see a greater uptake of open data
It’s happening everywhere else, so why shouldn’t it happen here? In the U.S. and the U.K., governments are opening up public sector data for others to use, so people can create applications designed to enhance government services and serve the public with government data. We’re already some of the way there in Canada, according to Microsoft Canada’s national technology officer John Weigelt. He pointed to initiatives such as the federal government’s Web 2.0 Practitioner’s (W2P) community, which encourages the development of collaborative Web 2.0 applications inside government. However, W2P itself is for government employees only.
Will we see more action to open up public data to external developers in 2011? Organizations like ChangeCamp, which promotes collaboration between technologists and civic government, are already anxious to get going. And it’s no coincidence that two of the top-ranking suggestions from the Canadian Government’s Consultation on the Digital Economy were: “open access to Canada’s public sector information and data” and “improved access to publicly funded data.”
There will be more government-wide projects to accelerate productivity and address out-of-date systems
Governments speak with many different voices, and they also compute with many different legacy platforms. This can lead to a mess when trying to unify public services and manage costs. Bernard Courtois, president and CEO of the Information Technology Association of Canada, said 2011 will be the year the government takes action and adopts a more holistic approach to its computing strategy.
“There will be a more enterprise-wide approach to computing and to applications like pay and human resources,” Courtois said. “Different governments are at a different level in applying organization-wide policies, but the auditor general has already told the federal government it needs a plan for this. We have applications running there that are 20 years old.
“Governments at all levels are aggressively pursuing deficit reductions, which will cause them to take a hard look at deficiencies. They’re also worried about the baby boomers reaching retirement.”
The first boomers officially begin retiring this year; what better time to start driving efficiencies into public operations?
Cloud computing will come to the fore
Cloud computing may be one way for government to quickly and effectively revitalize its computing infrastructure, said Lou Milrad, associate counsel at legal firm Miller Thomson. We have already seen the U.S. create Apps.gov, where federally approved cloud-computing services can be posted by the government for agency use. However, Milrad said the government will have to allay public fears about stewardship of sensitive citizen data first.
IT in business
Loosening financial markets and dollar parity will fuel tech investment
“The technology sector in Canada has had its ups and downs, to put it mildly,” said Catherine Swift, chair of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). “We’re expecting a better year for it in 2011.” Lack of financing for capital expenditure represented a big speed bump for technology investments when the world markets melted down, and a soaring U.S. dollar did nothing to help Canadian firms import technology. Now, however, things are picking up. In particular, dollar parity will help companies invest in technology again, much of which comes from the U.S.
“The [Canadian] dollar isn’t expected to fall any time soon. It’s tied closely to energy prices,” Swift said. “So now, people may say that they’re more likely to buy new technology. The challenge for smaller firms is to keep current.”
Productivity will again be a significant focus
Canadian productivity has taken a tumble. We rank 12th out of 17, according to the Conference Board of Canada. Courtois said a lack of aggression around high tech is part of the problem. “We have a productivity problem caused by underuse of digital technologies. I hear people raising that with the finance minister, just as I hear people in a whole range of industries raising this.”
Social networking applications will increasingly focus on specific objectives and requirements
We may have discovered social networking in the 2000s, but it was often seen as a workplace distraction. Pundits argue 2011 will be the year social networking grows up, as companies and consumers alike begin using it for more focused goals.
In the enterprise, social networking applications will manifest as social software, crafted for specific purposes. These could include internal applications designed to leverage employee knowledge to further business goals. “It’s how we are able to leverage collective intelligence to solve customer problems,” said Mukesh Gupta, director of strategic relations at Tata Consultancy Services.
However, it could also better identify customer behaviour, using hitherto unavailable data now revealed or collected within social applications as a means of targeting customers better. This will see social data married with traditional tools such as business analytics applications. “We will be able to predict behaviour using existing patterns in the system,” Gupta said.
Video will become ubiquitous
Networking giant Cisco is betting on the uptake of video. Drawing on data from carriers, it predicts that 90 per cent of Internet traffic will be video-based by 2013.
“IPTV in particular will have a big growth year,” said Dragan Nerandzic, CTO of Ericsson Canada, adding that the consumption of high-definition video will accelerate broadband rollouts. “We are going to the speeds that we need based on the types of video that we want to watch, and the types of video that we want to consume,” he said, predicting more fibre rollouts to the home.
Security threats will be increasingly sophisticated
CanSecWest security conference founder Dragos Ruiu warned that Canada is unprepared for a cybersecurity attack that could take down its critical infrastructure. Then Stuxnet happened. Look out for more as state-sponsored hackers up the ante in 2011, warns Andrew Jones, senior director of strategy and planning at Bell Canada.
“We are seeing advanced forms of malware. They will be more complex, and more rapidly changing, and it’s going to be very difficult for large firms and public sector organizations—except for the largest—to manage with confidence in those areas.”
Mobility
Increased competition will bring down costs and increase services
2010 saw the entrance of some key new players into the mobile market. Globalive and Orascom launched Wind Mobile, and Mobilicity also began offering services over its own HPDA network. With Shaw planning a late 2011 launch for its own regional wireless network, the CFIB’s Swift hopes to see prices continue to drop this year, even as functionality rises. It has still been a relatively short time since the new entrants hit the market, and there is plenty of room for the incumbents to make concessions.
“Trends lately have been positive in terms of the number of players in these markets, and that benefits the end user,” Swift said.
Secure mobile payments will increase substantially
Talk of using mobile phones as digital wallets has faded a little, following the initial fervour around the subject a few years ago. Nevertheless, the time is now right, said David Jacobson, a director in the consulting practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“It’s down to the vastly increased number of mobile smartphones in circulation and the ease with which you can choose and make purchases on a smartphone,” he said. “One of the ingredients there is price comparison and consulting with friends and so forth on social networks.”
Location-based services, social networking and easy mobile payment services such as Paypal will spur mobile phones to be mini-ecommerce devices, Jacobsen said. Social shopping sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, which both now have mobile phone apps, will serve to speed that development.
LTE will dominate new wireless cellular projects worldwide
No sooner have mobile carriers rolled out High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) networks than people are already talking about Long Term Evolution (LTE). “This is the first time in close to 30 years that one single technology will be accepted by operators large and small around the world,” said Ericsson’s Nerandzic.
But what of Canadian carriers that will want to leverage their recent HSPA deployments? They are still waiting for regulator approval, Nerandzic said. “Industry Canada will finalize the consultation process that will be applicable to LTE. That lies in the 700MHz frequency band. It will also relate to the end of analogue broadcast in Canada, which will be at the end of August 2011.”
Cloud computing
The natural symbiosis between the cloud and mobile devices will strengthen
Cloud computing makes mobile devices smarter. We have already seen examples of this with applications such as Google Goggles, which, among other functions, takes live video from a mobile phone and uses the almost limitless resources in the cloud to conduct visual searches on it. Google is also working on the next step: an embedded visual search system. The cloud’s ability to collect and collate large amounts of information makes it a perfect complement to mobile devices, and bringing the two together will create new experiences in areas such as augmented reality.
Privacy concerns, especially relating the cloud, will mount
Among the biggest problems for cloud computing is security and privacy. Miller Thomson’s Milrad said companies need to understand where sensitive data is being held and how it is being protected, to ensure they are not violating regulations.
Yet, the cloud is supposed to be opaque. The whole point is that we don’t have to worry about who is holding data where, including third parties under contract. How do we reconcile these issues? Vendors will continue researching that. HP, for example, has a team working on data governance in the cloud at its Bristol, U.K., research laboratory.
Machine-to-machine communications will be huge
Using the letter ‘M’ in tech talk, as in “m-commerce,” often means “mobile.”
“M will not be a synonym for mobility anymore. It will be a mark for machines,” Nerandzic said. More machi nes will connect to the cloud and they will be designed to speak directly to each other, rather than to us. Sensors in particular will be a big growth area in 2011, he said, pointing to Ericsson president and CEO Hans Vestberg’s prediction that there will be 50 billion connections by 2020. Everything from remote heart monitors to air quality sensors could be communicating with servers in the cloud as these deployments ramp up.
The majority of medium and large firms will be using the cloud or trying it before 2012
Only 18 per cent of organizations across 13 countries are using cloud computing right now, according to Cisco, but Bell’s Jones said this number will increase substantially. He expects most larger firms will jump on-board this year.
Not all clouds are created equal, however, he said. “For mid-sized and small firms it’s likely to be a public cloud,” but security and privacy concerns will drive larger players to retain some data in-house. These companies, however, will employ the same virtualization techniques as found in public cloud environments. “For a major bank or insurance firm, it …will look like a private or hybrid cloud.”
Cisco’s survey bears out his prediction; 88% of respondents predict they’ll be storing data in private or public clouds within three years.
End-user devices
Look for triple-digit growth in the Canadian tablet market
The iPad defined a new market category in 2010, and 2011 is already seeing a gaggle of vendors launch similar products. Canadian sales of tablets will grow by triple digits in 2011, said Krista Napier, senior analyst for Canadian emerging technology and digital media at IDC.
“A number of devices coming into the market will be around the iPad price point, but we do expect the price to come down. Customers are putting the price point closer to $400,” Napier said. We can also expect to see support for Flash on other devices, along with dual cameras, HDMI and USB ports. IDC expects the installed base of tablet devices in Canada to reach 1.5 million units.
We will see multiple end-user form factors
There was a time when the PC ruled the world but that’s changing, said Microsoft’s Weigelt. We can expect to see form factors proliferating in 2011, and tablets are only a part of that. “We’ll start to see TV sets as a first-class citizen on the Internet,” he said, adding that we’re moving away from the one-size-fits-all model of computing. “You’re not going to write a novel on your slate computer,” he said, and you probably won’t read one on your TV, either.
“The application developer and Web content developer now have to have form factors top of mind,” he said. Web sites and apps will need to take netbooks, laptops, desktops, slates, TVs, kiosks and smartphones into consideration. “In some cases some of the environments are very hardware-dependent. That is making life difficult for some developers.”
Ninety per cent of tablet users will be consumers, said IDC’s Napier, although they will also flourish in key verticals including retail, health care and education.
More mobile business users will move to thin-client computers
The IT industry is nothing if not cyclical. Jones’ prediction that many mobile business users will be thin-client users could be taken straight from 1993, when the idea of simple network-connected devices was all the rage. What’s different now, however, is that the Web has flourished and Google has produced an operating system designed purely for this environment. (Notebooks running Chrome OS go on sale in 2011.) “Many users and the majority of business travellers are going to ditch their laptops and exchange them for some kind of netbook, tablet or smartphone,” Jones said. Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, labelled “queen of the Internet,” supports this prediction. She said smartphones will outsell PCs in 2012.
Illustration: Gavin Orpen
In our February 2010 issue: Predictions 2010
