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Home » Computers And Internet Articles » Analysts Speculate It Tech Trends For 2008

Analysts Speculate IT Tech Trends for 2008

What are the experts predicting for tech trends in 2008? At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo held last October in Orlando, more than 6000 senior business and IT strategists from virtually all major industries gathered for the industry's largest conference to gain the latest advice on driving profits and performance with IT. Attendees rely on the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo for their annual planning and to gain insight into how their organizations can best use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency.

Reflecting Gartner's very latest research findings, the analysts projected the 10 technologies likely to play a 'strategic' role in 2008. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one "with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years." In addition Gartner also looks at "high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt."

"Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years," said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan."

Here's a look at the top 10 tech trends, and what Gartner had to say about them:

Green IT: The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will increase in 2008. As the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under investigation, companies should be mindful of potential regulations that could limit the building of data centers, and should be prepared with backup plans for handling growing data demands.

Unified Communications: At present only 20 percent of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, with more doing some sort of trial testing. Gartner says that over the next three years the majority of corporations will migrate to Internet Protocol telephony, resulting in a major change in voice communications.

Business Process Modeling: Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). A key to success will be an organization's ability to bring these roles together, whether they be process or service designated. Gartner also expects business process management software suites to better complement SOA applications development.

Metadata Management: Over the next three years, companies working to integrate both customer data and product data will link these master data management efforts together in an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. According to Gartner "This critical part of a company's information infrastructure will enable optimization, abstraction, and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability." Metadata management, Gartner notes, also extends into SOA software development projects with service registries and application development repositories.

Virtualization 2.0: Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization, but with the addition of automation technologies-with service-level, policy-based active management-even greater improvements are possible. "Resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency," Gartner says.

Mashup and Composite Apps: Over the next 3 years, Web mashups will be the way companies create composite enterprise applications, Gartner predicts. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.

Web Platform and Web-Oriented Architecture: Software-as-a-Service, in which applications are available on-demand over the Web, is becoming a sensible option for many companies. Emerging Web platforms, Gartner says, will provide service-based access to information, applications, and business processes through Web-based "cloud computing" environments. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how Web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.

Computing Fabric: According to Gartner researchers, "A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner's needs." The researcher added, "For example a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server."

Real World Web: The term "real world Web" is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. Gartner states, "It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds. It is used in real-time based on the real world situation, not prepared in advance for consumption at specific times or researched after the events have occurred." It gives the example of a navigation unit that adjusts the information it delivers as a car or boat moves around. Gartner sees real world Web application improving many business processes and creating new revenue streams.

Social Software: The Web 2.0 market will go through a lot of changes between now and 2010, Gartner says, and will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, resulting in considerable vendor consolidation. However, the research firm does see social networking being adopted by many enterprises to augment traditional collaboration.

According to Gartner, "These 10 opportunities should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-matured technologies, as we as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies," said Carl Claunch, vice president at Gartner. "For example, real-time enterprises providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list might offer."

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Your Website - Your Virtual Business Card

To make one thing clear way ahead, without a website you will not survive on this market. And while you are at it, make sure the website is user-friendly because you will need to make changes once in a while and if only to promote some new services. A website should list all the services you are about to offer as well as all your contact details. In the US pictures of yourself and your colleagues are seen as a sign of trustworthiness and reliability, in Europe this notion is not so widely spread, mainly because we are a little shy when it comes to posting pictures of ourselves on the net.

One important detail should never be omitted: your VAT number and the company's General Standard Terms and Conditions. Even though it is a global world and all, make sure to indicate that if anybody likes to take you to court, it will have to be a relevant court in your country.

It is also quite useful, or so I have been told, to have a quotation form on your site so that the client can get a price quotation for the potential job real fast. I have posted one on my site but honestly I don't really see any advantage in this. The clients have always contacted me via email or phone without using this form so the day is near when I will take this damned thing offline again.

Links and tools which can be useful for any translator or interpreter are always welcome. I see my site as a way to promote things I like seeing on the net, useful websites I have come across, useful shareware, interesting glossaries, dictionaries, events coming up, sites of friends and colleagues, practically anything that makes my daily routine easier and more fun. Again, it is up to you what to link to but it is advisable to check the links once in a while to see if they are still working - the internet is a fast-changing medium!

So now you have it all, a website with a clear message and some useful tools and links and on top of it a good provider to host it. Here I made the rather costly experience that it pays off to have a provider in your hemisphere, your country. My first provider was an enterprise in Arizona, US and one day got merged with the competition. I ended up paying more fees for less service and when I wanted to change providers they blocked my domain name and made things real complicated for a while.

Again, now you have it all, so how to promote this thing? You want people to find you not the other way around it, right? Well, if you have not forgotten to include some keywords so that search robots are going to find your site, go ahead and submit your site to the various search engines, i.e. Google, Alta Vista and all. There are services on the net which will post your website on any search engine available for free. Don't fall for any of those companies claiming they will submit your website on various search engines in exchange for a hefty fee. You can save that money! Just google "submit url free search engines" and the results will point you to various providers you can use for this. Also make yourself known on the various translators portals, write up an article about your profession once in a while for the various associations, post messages on the mailing lists (make sure your website is mentioned in the footer of the message), post a newsletter on your site etc. T!

he list is endless for promoting your services but keep in mind with fame comes notoriety. Keep in mind, the website is just meant to be your virtual business card, it is not meant for opening doors to your computer for anybody out there. If you're on the Internet you need to have good anti-virus software and a firewall, period. And you need to keep them updated. If you use Windows you need to use the Windows Update feature at least monthly to make sure that any discovered holes are patched. This goes triple if you use Internet software that integrates closely with Windows, like MS Outlook or Internet Explorer. This will cover you for the vast majority of security problems out there. I also review CNET news and Yahoo's most popular news items to see if there are any other security issues or rampant viruses I should be aware of.

This brings us to all the unsolicited mail you tend to get, once you are online with your website and email, the so-called SPAM. Some e-mail programs have built-in spam filters, while sometimes your ISP will offer a spam-filtering program. If you don't have either of these options you may wish to consider a spam-filtering program to keep your e-mail more about job offers and less about any number of a dozen scams. Do a search for "spam filtering" or "anti-spam software".

One word of advice: The Internet has over four billion pages. Everyone is going to approach it with different needs and interests. Not everybody will have your well-being in mind so please use your common sense and the resources available on the net to reduce any chances of getting burned.