Predictions for 2008 using my del.icio.us tag cloud

By Nick Hortovanyi

Its that time of year, when writing about your predictions for 2008 is all the rage. I've been tagging some by others on del.icio.us with prediction2008.

I've included my current del.licio.us tags in descending order of importance. It highlights the areas that I have had an active interest in either for current work or for research of future activities. So i've used them as the subjects for my predictions for 2008.

my del.icio.us tags

• SaaS
• business
• web2.0
• ibm
• soa
• via:aqualung
• development
• google
• collaboration
• innovation
• Microsoft
• architecture
• blog
• Java
• lotus+connections
• opensource

SaaS

Software as a Service will continue to become mainstream , as skilled resources become harder to find, internet connectivity latency decreases with the corresponding increase in bandwidth capacity. Wall Street will be even more attracted to the SaaS recurring pricing models, such that it will provide a higher potential exit price for Venture Capital backed organisations. Thus driving high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation in the SaaS sector then in comparison to traditional on-premise software delivery companies.

Business

Will continue to see their core Information Technology assets as a cost of doing business and will treat it as a commodity component. IT Consultants will find new ways to work with business, that is more closely aligned to business innovation within their specific industry. Nothing that new here, but internal IT skills will become less IT technical and more analytics driven. Marketing departments will take on more responsibility for analytics and data warehousing to improve marketing ROI.

Local markets in the developed world will continue to become a deeper shade of "red", as competition increases, driving exploration of new markets for growth through volume and innovation in delivery and execution. 

Web2.0

Is a technical label, that has been assigned to represent a change of thinking regarding memes around a social and networked world. It has signaled the rise of the long tail, being that of the boutique network connected micro-economy. Organisations in 2008, will reevaluate their methods of engaging with the market, and the micro-economy, as the number of larger and mid tiered firms dissipate through M&As.

IBM

IBM will embrace cloud computing (eg blue cloud) but have difficulties in engaging with customers in this area; whilst it is still perceived internally as a hardware and people services company. Margins for resellers, will continue to dwindle (hardware and software) as IBM software sales, outside of SMB, finally exceed hardware sales and thus moves focus from hardware. IBM will continue to work on, but won't formulate wining strategies in 2008, to take market spend from Microsoft in the SMB software area. IBM's sales force in 2008, focused on on-premise engagement will have difficulties with the off-premise SaaS nature of cloud computing. In 2008, there will be some high profile success stories publicized for Blue Cloud.

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture will continue to drive new systems and rationalisation of existing within the larger enterprises. Adoption of the SOA Architecture Style within enterprises will increase. However, unless machine generated, WS-* style service adoption will decrease. Skilled IT Architects capable of service decomposition  between business services and technical services will be in short supply for 2008.

SOA will continue to drive the demand for new on-premise middleware products. A number of new products will emerge in 2008, possible based on SCA/SDO, that allow utilisation of multiple programming languages and development paradigms.

via:aqualung

Thanks Ric lots of great material. Think more will come, including lots of great riffs and conversations. In 2008, I predict Ric will be writing more blog entries. 

Development

The Art of Developing computer systems will start to influence education in the area of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Iterative agile development processes will continue to be favored over waterfall methodologies. Some procurement departments will explore contracts that allow iterative development methodologies, but this will still not be the norm in 2008. This disconnect between what developers do and what contracts state will continue.

There will be increased interest in scripting languages such as Python and Ruby and further exploration of languages or changes to existing languages to support parallel computing. Functional languages such as ErLang, Haskell and OCaml will gain more of the spotlight.

Google 

Google will continue to influence developers through its Google Code. Google SaaS based services will influence development approaches and continue to play havoc with administrators who favor closed firewalls and block external high use URLs. Google will utilise more personal profile data to improve search results and at the same time use it to increase Ad revenue from targeted advertising.

Smaller SMBs will gain trust in Google and really start to question the value/cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure.

Collaboration

Social software will gain some traction in more forward thinking organisations but it will still be an enathma to command and control based management. New products will be developed that utilise analytics in conjunction with project management methodologies to form groups/teams for delivery of specific deliverables based on a continuously moving project plan (isn't this what we do anyway manually?).

Innovation

Business will seek innovation to be internally driven and not from vendors, but will struggle with out outside influence. Australia will invest heavily in building infrastructure to support exporting of innovation overseas.

Microsoft

Will recover the market position lost with WindowsVista . SaaS (or as they call it Software plus Services) will continue to attract media spotlight as Microsoft seeks to gain new revenue streams and move focus from on-premise software. Huge internal debates over this will continue with little leakages, every now and then, to the market over the 2008 year. Headlines may move from Google vs Microsoft to IBM vs Microsoft, if Blue Cloud is a success.

Architecture

IT architecture will be important in organisations, as an enabler of structure. Many more titles containing the term Architecture will evolve in the 2008 year. IT Architects (of whatever title) will continue to find new ways of explaining the value of this abstract thinking to business and further consolidation of this knowledge will occur on the internet, such as at IASA.

Blog

PR agencies will learn how to influence the blogosphere. The informal citizen journalist will continue to eat into the revenues of traditional print media. Blogging in conjunction with bookmarking will become the preferred means over google to find "trusted" content and advice.

Java 

This is the pinnacle year for Java, the programming language, in the enterprise world. As concurrent computing needs are accelerated through the multi-core focus of CPU vendors, it may be perceived that the effort to modify the Java language specifications is higher then the benefits gained by using other programming languages. SOA standards, such as SCA and SDO, are evolving to be language neutral, this will reduce the reliance on Java in enterprise middleware products.

Lotus Connections

This is an interesting product, that shows the possibilities of internet based software behind the firewall. The 2007 year saw, too many new products evolve from IBM in my view, thus there may be in 2008, a consolidation of products to compete against Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services in the SMB space. My blog receives a large number of hits for "sharepoint vs websphere portal" searches on google, so it wouldn't surprise me if Lotus Connections is rolled into WebSphere Portal Express for the SMB market.

Open Source

Will still be here at the end of 2008. Microsoft will continue to push new standards based around its technology stack. The next killer app may emerge if usability and visual issues can be addressed. Has Windows Vista opened the door for the Linux desktops? We'll see this time next year.

Trends for 2008 corporate web sites

By Nick Hortovanyi

Our current company web site, gets great comment from the people who read it as a great example of a corporate web site. There are a few pages that get some hits and this is mainly people trying to find out about us, our services or our contact information. In contrast our blog server gets a significant higher number of hits, not only from the search engines but also from our ATOM/RSS syndicated content that is propagated to other aggregators.

The difference is so much so, that our organisation has started working on a new web site for 2008 and beyond.

The aim of this web site so far, is to:

• showcase our delivery capabilities through example;
• highlight recent blog entries for those that may not know of our blog server;
• leverage our investment in social software;
  
• promote our company, our success, our services and our products;
• use web 2.0 style components to create a richer experience;
• deliver more meaningful and precise memes in a shorter time frame;
  
• create an interactive brochure about our organisation;
• reduce reliance on "www" type addresses;
  
• move to a more dynamic and richer experience;
  
• maintain just enough content on the page for Search Engines;
• direct people to other means of learning about us as people (living mamals) and engaging with us besides the "traditional" brochure ware site; and
  
• show what we believe to be the corporate web site style for 2008 to 2010 time frame.
  

To achieve the above we are experimenting at the moment with a one page interactive design using tools from Google Code, mootools and the Dojo Toolkit along with flash animation (reverting to static images for those corporates that have not enabled it). The one page interactive design is really different and does look cool (not ready to show people just yet).

To a large extent, our current production site, has been optimised for speed with lower bandwidth connections. Looking at Google Analytics that represents less then 5% of visitors. So the new site will load slower for the dialup guys, but c'mon they should upgrade to something better anyway (hope I'm not being discriminate)

Consideration was given for using our blog server as our web site with a couple of extra pages, but I don't think corporates are ready for that (or maybe it is us who are not ready?). So our experiment with the pre-mentioned aims, seems to be shaping up nicely.

How many different organisation's Portals do you interact with in a day?

By Nick Hortovanyi

Portal technology is great. I've been a proponent of it for a while now and am starting to see the next wave of issues evolving from an outside person looking in. That is as I engage with more organisations, there are more portals that I need to engage with to be able to complete activities for my clients.

As an IT Architect, to some degreee, I'm becoming a broker between the client and vendor portals. This is normally ok, if there is one or two portals to interact with, any more and you are spending a significant amount of time potentially finding information through unfamiliar navigation.

To overcome this issue what we need is more effective ways of projecting relevant information into our own portal, such that it is a ubiquitous experience. One approach is to replicate the vendors information in your environment and then create portlets and applications to expose it within your portal. This could become quite expensive when change occurs through the need to update interfaces and applications. Another approach would be to use WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) to project that content externally into your own portal, with you corporations theme, but your vendors content. I'm not seeing many organisations promoting this approach quite yet but would see pressure starting soon by the more progressive organisations on their trading partners to start supplying WSRP enabled content and portlets shortly.

This issue is sure to become larger as organisations start using more external service providers to stream line activities and align expenses more closely with sales.