2010 Tech Forecasts
In 2009, the two biggest analyst firms, IDC and Gartner, did a good job at forecasting how IT would fare for the previous year. The same goes with Forrester Research and 451 Group. There were a few errors, of course, but many companies did well by taking their predictions to heart. With the new year 2010, here are some of the IT predictions that they have made for the next 12 months.
SLAs are going to move to the cloud. Cloud computing on managed hosting is the hottest thing in IT today and in 2010, businesses are going to demand more accountability from their cloud providers. Basic cloud services are beginning to become more of a commodity so vendors are going to attempt to make themselves stand out by packaging their products and services in various ways, offering them to target markets to meet specific compliance requirements.
Social media is going to enter the enterprise. Practically everyone has predicted that IT spending will go downhill in 2009 and so it did. That was a no-brainer considering the state of the economy when 2008 closed.
But IDC was ahead when it predicted the removal of the business/personal wall in IT as the 2.0 culture and the economy drive business and consumer technology together. For 2010, IDC takes this prediction further by saying that business applications will also go through a fundamental change. These apps will be joined with social and collaboration software and analytics to give rise to socialytic apps.
And then comes the iTablet. This isn’t really surprising considering that there are a lot of rumors going around that Apple is more likely to enter the tablet market. But Apple might be up for a flop as industry experts see the Tablets as underpowered and only marginally portable. IDC, however, implies that the company might have already learned from the mistakes of the past and there’s a big chance that it might succeed where others have failed.
