| Five Hot Technologies for 2007 1. Ruby on Rails Faster, easier Web development 2. NAND drives Bye-bye, HDD? 3. Ultra-Wideband 200x personal-area networking 4. Hosted hardware Supercomputing for the masses 5. Advanced CPU architectures Penryn, Fusion and more |
Doing business is becoming increasingly more complex as companies need to cope with global competition, multiple jurisdictions, laws and compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, and the explosion of data.
Information technology (IT) is also becoming increasingly complex as larger applications and operating systems looms, along with more complex networks, including wireless connections causing security concerns created by the challenge of more users in a variety of locations, including mobile access on the road.
A solid IT foundation can help industry CXOs refocus on their core business objectives and become more flexible to ultimately enable growth and manage industry fluctuations. As CXOs begin to create 2007 plans, they would do well to consider the following major technology trends for a happy IT in 2007.
Maturing mobility. In Japan and Korea, where 3G has been established for quite some time, the current devices and applications of mobility are reaching a plateau until the next generation of communications, battery life and human interface technologies emerge.
In Hong Kong and Singapore, where 3G is just beginning to enjoy take-up, businesses can look forward to further advances in these applications, while in China, where 2G is the norm and WiFi hot spots are scarce, the enormous market means that the market for mobile devices is exploding. For example, adding 5.5 million cellphone subscribers per month requires applications to support millions of new users as well as network and infrastructure upgrade.
Expanding edge. In Japan and Korea, the Edge, or the farthest point of IT with application, will continue to extend modestly in terms of devices, and in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, the expansion will be more aggressive, while in China, the advance will be dramatic. Increased wireless Internet access and 3G take-up will be the key drivers.
Across the region, the volume of IT will expand rapidly. This year, companies will begin understanding the value of context in addition to content, as seen in the quick and widespread adoption of Internet advertising to cellphone and PDA form factors as well as in user-generated content, and, in parallel, personal electronic devices will progress significantly in use and application.
Shift from monolithic to granular applications. This shift is orchestrated by automated business processes and will begin with enterprise applications and expand as part of the shift to Service Oriented Architecture as demand for more customized applications and the market for goods and services moves towards customer empowerment.
Firms in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are leading the way in this area, as both the existing IT infrastructure and widespread Internet access have already conditioned businesses and customers to change both goods and services purchase habits.
Security and privacy. More sophisticated and subtle attacks on security will continue, and prevention and remediation techniques will mimic the defense mechanisms of the human body. A global study by IDC ranked human factors as the three most important elements in information security. People and their lack of adherence to procedures will remain the dominant security and privacy risk. In APAC, IDC rated wireless security solutions as the top security technology, with forensics, storage security and business continuity and disaster recovery solutions among the top five.
Infrastructure goes virtual. Smaller and mid-sized companies, the predominant business model in Asia, will begin to adopt the rudimentary idea of cloud computing where data services and architecture are on a server and you can access the "cloud" by a PC, Blackberry, or mobile phone. On the other hand, large companies will continue to struggle to understand the how, what, when and why of utility computing, where customers are billed for the actual use of resources.
Decision automation improves. Simulation capabilities will move from engineering to business usage and will drive better decision-making. Advanced companies will begin using multi-chorus chips to build cause-and-effect models to make decisions. Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are likely to see the earliest deployments to speed up decision-making with customers.
Shift of IT spend from maintenance to development. Application rationalization and modernization, through refactoring business rules, extracting business processes and applying them to advanced capabilities, will cause this shift. System governance requirements will force management to become more aware of the risk associated with old, unsupportable code and demand action. It is likely this shift will initially take place in the more advanced economies in the region.
Personalized services will increase service quality. With concern of identity theft on the rise in the region concurrent with the proliferation of broadband and 3G, anonomyzed personal information will become increasingly available to protect privacy. However, there will be a continued acceptance of trading some degree of privacy for service, price and convenience.
Fast-paced change is the hallmark of modern life and modern business, as globalization forces people and companies all around the world to interact and conduct transactions. To manage life and business in a globalized environment, complexity in IT is something that not only is necessary, but should be embraced. The trend towards complexity in IT enables savvy executives to combine interwoven components into a synergy more than a sum of the parts, empowering them to lead their organizations ahead of changes.
Web exclusive, January 2007
Two trends in information technology will become increasingly important to CIOs in 2007: a migration to service-oriented architectures and the introduction of lean-manufacturing principles to data center operations. These are among the results of our most recent survey of senior IT executives. The survey asked CIOs and other senior executives in North American companies about their plans for the coming year.1
New technologies and trends constantly compete for a share of the enterprise IT budget, and during each cycle, one or two rise above the others to become a major focus for CIOs. In 2006 two areas of critical focus have been software as a service and server consolidation and virtualization—two trends that CIOs, a year earlier, had cited as important.2
As those technologies gain traction, executives are also signaling interest in two further trends to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Sixty-four percent of the respondents to the 2006 survey told us they plan to implement service-oriented architectures in the coming year. This strong response suggests that the thinking about IT architectures is shifting to embrace global standards for interaction, both internally and with external partners and suppliers. Advocates of service-oriented architectures expect them to make IT more flexible, open, and efficient by facilitating communication and interaction between systems. Under this design, common IT tasks, called services, can work smoothly together, regardless of an organization’s underlying technology platform. The concept has been around for years, but as more organizations adopt Web services standards, interest in these architectures has grown. That interest persists even though many executives have been unclear about the precise meaning of the term—a confusion made worse by some vendors’ propensity to label every product as “service oriented.” Despite this confusion, the compelling benefits of service-oriented architectures—easier communication and interaction among applications—and the increasingly mature offerings from vendors are enticing more IT executives to give it a close look.
Just as interesting to us, 48 percent of the CIOs we surveyed in 2006 said that they plan to implement service-oriented architectures for integration with external trading partners in 2007. Traditionally, companies pilot any new integration technology within the firewall, and broader adoption for integration with trading partners follows a few years later. The fact that so many IT departments are already moving beyond the internal pilot stage means that enthusiasm for this trend is high. What’s more, the wide-spread adoption of software as a service promises to encourage the spread of service-oriented architectures, because they make it easier to integrate enterprise systems with applications from third-party vendors.
The second trend poised to strengthen in 2007 is the application of lean-manufacturing principles to data centers. In our recent survey, 28 percent of the respondents said that they had already applied or decided to apply lean principles to improve their data center operations. Lean, of course, isn’t a technology but rather a methodology applied to processes—originally in manufacturing operations but increasingly within services, including IT.
Data centers have grown tremendously over the past 10 to 15 years as IT spending has increased and cost-conscious CIOs have consolidated smaller centers into fewer and larger ones. A data center for a typical large enterprise has hundreds of millions of dollars in capital equipment (server farms, mainframes, networking gear, and storage devices), consumes large amounts of electricity, and requires hundreds of highly skilled engineers and technicians to operate. In particular, the labor costs have grown significantly with the commitment of resources to processes such as incident response, problem management, and change management. Applying lean principles can help reduce waste and improve labor productivity by as much as 40 percent in some processes. Nearly one-third of our survey respondents aim to apply lean principles in these centers—a significant share, suggesting that the initial positive results from early adopters are encouraging a wider field of IT organizations to explore this methodology. We will continue to track these trends—and their implications for business and IT leaders—during 2007.