Nine IT Market Trends to Plan For

Year after year, technology and market conditions accelerate and IT finds itself scrambling to stay on top of project loads. Proactive strategizing helps to anticipate rapidly changing technologies and business conditions--but it also helps to determine where trends are likely to accelerate fastest.

This article takes a look at nine technology trends likely to affect IT and end businesses over the next two years.

1. VoIP, Wireless and Mobile Devices

Telcos and enterprises are making the transition to IP-based technologies, eroding traditional telephone service (TDM). The benefits are clear. Cost savings, especially for long distance service, are greatly reduced with VoIP (voice over Internet protocol). VoIP also facilitates the convergence of voice and data traffic on networks, while it establishes a platform for unified traffic management of voice and data. From an end user applications standpoint, companies are actively merging email and voicemail, another benefit of VoIP. A majority of employees are now getting their voicemail over corporate email, where they simply click on sound bites to hear messages. VoIP also provides an easy means for unified messaging on the multitude of communications devices that employees use and carry.

Unsurprisingly, the changeover to VoIP has increased reliance on mobile devices and communications strategies in the field. Cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and Blackberries are all widely used-and not just for voice-based applications. Many of these devices now host critical enterprise applications that allow for immediate response and greater productivity. This has required IT and vendors to scale applications, databases and user interfaces to the footprints of tiny devices. In this environment, usability engineering is as essential as data access and functional capability. Equally important is a set of security policies and methods that safeguard these devices.

2. Corporate Security

Several highly-publicized data base break-ins at major universities and corporations have generated negative image problems for corporations over the past few years, and business and IT executives are highly sensitized to this very important area. Regulators also are dialed in to security, notably in the healthcare (HIPAA) and financial (Sarbanes Oxley) sectors.

At the mainframe, server and network edge levels, security methodologies and mitigation strategies have matured and are continuing to evolve to meet the increased sophistication of hackers and attackers. Mature solutions are widely deployed for virtual private networks (VPNs), firewalls, anti-virus software, and data encryption.

One emerging area in IT's radar today is the security that surrounds mobile computing, which many enterprises are engaged in. What happens if an employee loses a device with critical data on it? There are now means to remotely shut down the device from a central point. Data on these devices can also be encrypted so that it is hard to decipher.

A second area of security activity is the active employment by enterprises of two-factor authentication, which involves the server providing a signon user id, the user supplying a password, and the server then creating a pathway into other systems that the application must interface with. Since several key security parameters are not furnished by the end user, it becomes very difficult for outsiders to gain access to critical data.

Including access safeguard methods like two-factor authentication is not new. What is new are new technologies that make sophisticated security measures easy to implement and to use.

Companies like Sweet Spot Solutions (www.sweetspotsolutions.com) manufacture a security thumb drive that now makes it a reality to embed two-factor authentication, virus fighting and VPN access on a single thumb drive interacting with a USB port that a network user inserts into his machine for security authorization and access. All the user has to do is to provide his password. If the thumb drive is lost, it can be immediately deactivated from a central point. The best news for IT is that constant software downloads and hand installation of security on devices across the enterprise are eliminated. If a thumb drive, typically kept on a user's key chain, gets lost--it can be immediately reported and de-implemented by the central IT administrator. This new security thumb drive has built-in access to standard VPNs (e.g., Microsoft, Novell, Cisco, etc.) and eliminates the problems users have in remembering multiple userid-password combinations for different network resources.

Another active security area is security breaches that occur within the walls of the enterprise. In-house security breaches can come from employees who inadvertently breach security policies, or from disgruntled employees sabotaging information-or from employees who are leaving the company and taking critical intellectual property with them. Corporate auditors now test for these scenarios in "social engineering" audits. They look at IT's hardcore security prevention practices and at "soft skill" areas such as employee orientations, training and security policies in employee handbooks.

3. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Over 80% of mission-critical software runs on legacy systems. The software is a treasure chest of business rules and data stores that drive critical areas of the enterprise. Enterprises have discovered that this heritage legacy can be leveraged by incorporation into new applications that are Web- and multi-platform-based. They can do this without recoding by wrapping modules of legacy code with interface-independent logic that allows these objectized modules to be used and reused as Web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. New development platforms like IBM WebSphere allow facile development of SOA solutions. The key is getting the right persons on the IT team to collaborate with people in the end business so that legacy code can be sorted through and modularized into the appropriate reusable modules. This requires a detailed knowledge of how internal and external business processes work-along with the legacy code behind each of these processes.

The results are stunning. New application development that employs reusable legacy code modules is rapid, consistent and reliable. The developer toolsets that enable this to happen are intuitive-and they don't require developers to have extensive knowledge of mainframe technologies. For enterprise executives, SOA promises a reusable methodology that offers long-term investment protection for the intellectual heritage that began decades ago on proprietary systems.

4. Business Alignment and "Soft" Skills

SOA and other new application development strategies are only as successful as the people using them. One thing that has not changed in IT over the years is a persistent need for technologists who can identify with the end business world, and effectively communicate with the business side of the enterprise. More time will be devoted in enterprises to finding people within IT who can talk the language of business and people on the business side who can relate to the technology jargon and methods of IT. This cross-disciplinary middle ground has to be covered for business processes to be unearthed on both the business and the technical sides. The end result is the ability to recognize those critical components of legacy code (and internal business processes) that can be reused again and again in application development that addresses new marketplace and business issues.

5. e-Channels

Organizations will continue to push the envelope on commercial e-channels for business. This includes robust security measures for consumers and businesses, Web metrics and tracking, creative and dynamic content and Website compliance, and Website customization options for end users. Web technology is pervasive, as demonstrated in Web services that are becoming part of applications development and SOA. IT will need to maintain momentum in this area-and finesse on the backend of system/Web integration.

6. Collaboration

Organizations with geographically-disseminated offices are now finding attractive price and performance points for online collaboration. The push for collaborative work teams is adding a fourth "leg" to VoIP Triple Play (voice-data-imaging) with video. For effective collaborative technology, IT needs the skills in telecommunications technologies, return on investment (ROI) and quality of service (QoS) to be able to deliver video-based collaborative conferencing capabilities to medical practitioners who want to remotely collaborate on a medical diagnosis or the planning of a surgical procedure; or teams of architects and engineers in different cities who are collaborating on an urban development project.

7. Green Initiatives and Asset Management

With new technologies like VoIP, it has been important to manage assets so that when they reach the ends of their life cycles, they can be supplanted with new technology. A new dimension to all of this is the plethora of "green" regulations on the horizon for disposable hardware assets. Where do these assets go, and who pays the bill for environmental cleanup? Large enterprises in particular are likely to be on the list of payees, and IT executives need to begin factoring these additional disposal costs into asset management cycles. Green initiatives will impact return on investment (ROI) and other cost measurements that IT and others in the business evaluate technology effectiveness with.

8. Vendor Management and Partnering

So many new technologies are coming online that it is impossible for IT to address them all with internal resources. Careful vendor selection should high be on IT management's list. This should include vendors that can provide solutions that exactly fit the needs of the business in a cost-effective way-and vendors that can deliver reliability and excellent daily performance through the issuance and management of service level agreements (SLAs). For vendor management to work, talented IT administrators must monitor vendor performance and communicate with vendors to ensure that day to day goals are met. They should share strategic forecasts for corporate technology with their most trusted vendors so that vendors can anticipate future needs and be there with solutions when the time comes.

9. Open Source

Open Source (and Linux platforms) are already prevalent in IT infrastructures and embedded systems. OS will be expanding to end applications and service bureau environments as well. All of the major technology vendors have adopted strategies and partnerships for a forecasted Open Source applications market of 20% of all enterprise applications by 2012. The advantages of Open Source for enterprises are lower licensing costs; the availability of "free" software from the worldwide Open Source community; the ability to run software on low-cost Linux boxes; and vendor independence. On the flip side is IT's need for a strong governance policy to manage Open Source licenses and compliance in a vendor-independent environment.

Wrapup

This article covered nine key technology trends likely to impact IT planning and spending over the next two years. As IT executives well know, there are also other technology and business pressures to balance and contend with. At the end of the day, all of these factor into planning and budgets, and each enterprise makes a "best effort" to anticipate and fund its most business-critical initiatives. The good news is that technology advances and competitive pressures are sensitizing solution providers to the realities that corporate IT faces every day-lowering price points and creating high usability and rapid deployment of technologies that are entering the corporate supply line.