Predictions for 2008
by
Charlie Bess
This year I’m going to go out on the limb a bit further than in the past, and focus on the positive things that will be coming.
- Mobile Redefinition – The mobile market is going to undergo a significant shift. will have traction on a larger scale, even thought it was on the list of things that didn’t make it in 2007 for PC mag. We’re going to see quite a bit of pre-availability announcements for mobile capabilities based on new spectrum available in 2009. We may even see the rebirth of the carrier on a global scale. The mobile phone market will be in for a major shakeup in 2008 with openness and other competitive pressures becoming prevalent. Some people say that 2007 is the year of the new mobile OS. Next year will be the year the real change precipitates out.
- Unified communications for home and business will begin to be incorporated in most organizations planning in 2008. It will not be an infrastructure only issue though. It will also provide the central source (service) for personnel/personal context within the enterprise.
- Broad acceptance of SaaS and web based applications will take place but probably not in ways that we may think. A wider range of businesses will use service based approaches to enable their activities and it will be as controversial as offshoring has been.
- This will be the year when we see real deliverables for new user interfaces, moving beyond the mouse. Just like the Wii used a new interface to take some old technology and make it new again, we’ll see similar advances on the PC interface. Gestures, voice, displays… it’s time.
- Personal area networks are going to take on many new features and replace most cords and other transfer techniques. UWB in Bluetooth 3.0 will allow for video conferencing… and other techniques from many smaller more portable devices. This will enable an environmental view of computing – using the capabilities of the area, not just what I bring with me. This will also allow more device collaboration in meeting my needs – smart systems hiding in plain sight.
- Security will begin to move beyond problem prevention into actual information assurance, assisting organizations and team in responded to events. If it can be effective stopping bad things we should have every expectation that it will enable the right things.
- We will begin to see wider use of automation in the assembly of software and infrastructure. We’ve been talking about SOA for a while now and quite a few organizations have a software infrastructure set of services available as a foundation for new solutions. We’ll see more effective products assembling those services into solutions that add business value. I’ve said this before, and still believe it.
On the corporate front we’re going to continue to see more virtualization and cores… Now we’re beginning to expect that (shipping 8 core chips by the end of ’08 by more than just Sun?). We’re also going to see Green IT become something talked about in the front office and not just in the back. We’ve barely seen the tip of that iceberg.
I’ve been mentioning workflow for a number of years and we’re beginning to see it move from the desktop into mobile devices and that will be common place by the end of 2008 as various COTS applications incorporate mobile interfaces. Collaboration on mobile devices will also take off as part of Enterprise 2.0 activities.
I doubt that we'll see widespread use of electronic paper techniques in business even though there are some quite interesting capabilities out there now and those devices will drop significantly in price by the end of 2008.
