“New Knowledge has overturned the world we knew and shaken the pillars of power that held in place. Surveying the wreckage, ready once more to create a new civilization, we stand all together at ground zero,” aptly writes Alvin Toffler in one of his bestselling triad ‘Power Shift'. His vision, that the world division — if at all it arises — will not be between East and West or North and South, but between the “fast” and the “slow”, matches with experts' prediction of technology trends during the next five years.
While a lot of buzz is on cloud and networking, technology insurgence is taking place in many other bailiwicks. After iPhone, proliferation of devices has become a continent of commercial opening for technology. Social media has already started pulling the busiest of the busy people to kill time in something which has no objective. Distributed computing has ascended so many steps that the West has started talking of fourth generation system development where there is no hardware at all. The rapid rate of technology advancement has pushed the vapid knowledge collaboration. The time has come where companies without business intelligence are not considered as companies at all. Let us now consider the elite few of them.
Cloud computing uses a pay-per-use model wherein all the applications and software are stored on the network and accessed by the Internet. This will result in a reduction of costs to companies as they do not have to purchase these products. The cloud is mostly used by the small- and medium-scale industries so as to adjust to some unpredictable scalability issues. Even the vendors in this space are limited to a few. By 2015, I imagine, a bountiful of vendors and a plentiful of users in this space.
From digital divide to digital unite: The question of digital divide may not arise as the statistics show that by 2011 the sales of Smartphones would surpass that of PCs and also the proliferation of notebooks with 3G technologies might increase many folds in the next two years.
Social networking: Collaboration is colossal in corroborating information but at the same time it is also corroding precious time. Around my place, a minute in every six minutes is spent on social networking. With more than 20 hours of video getting uploaded on YouTube every minute, the traffic is going to increase at a steep rate. With Google Wave on the cards, social networking might replace e-mail soon.
Web 2.0: The Y generation Web technologies or Web 2.0 is much talked about these days. It has opened new gates of opportunities for developers. A browser without a refresh button is no more a travesty. High-speed and low-cost Internet is the cornerstone for this progression. E-commerce shall be heralded as the vanguard of green environment for saving a lot of transport and trees.
Predictive business intelligence: “The best businessman is the one who knows with whom is he competing with and what is he competing for.” In today's world, one might not change but one's competitors and also the market segment might change overnight without notice. Hence, it is important to keep notice of the trends that are going on with one's own business as a pivotal point. Predictive Analytics and Competitive Intelligence are the best tools for the same. More technology investment would be done in this segment for better products down the line.
Data security: Every technological improvement brings in many threats with it. So, the omnipresent data security domain remains the hottest technology trend which is by far the most important one of all.
From ‘we can make it happen' to ‘somehow, it happens': I can bet that by 2015, the situation for a software development project might be that there are no plans, no deadlines, no status reports, no metrics, no deliverables, no one works for anyone, no accountability but the project is ubiquitous, it keeps going on and lot of people buzz about it.
(The author is Applications Engineer, Oracle Pvt. Ltd.)
