Future IT Trends

8/12/2019 Future IT Trends

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IT and Software Trends that will

make the difference in the Future

-R.A.S. Ravi Sankar

Date: 17-Jan-08


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IT trends : Topics to be covered

1. Biometrics

2. Browser based Computing

3. Business Intelligence & Analytics4. Open Source

5. Printing

6. Software as a Service

7. Service Oriented Architecture

8. Unified Threat Management

9. Storage

10. Unified Communications

11. Virtualization Technologies

12. Web 2.0


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1. Biometrics: the story so far

Banks have embraced biometrics as the 2nd

layer of authentication. Action has moved beyond fingerprint scans

to other forms.

Biometric information can be stored in smart

cards provided to an individual.

Forget bulky scanners, miniaturization is in

vogue


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Biometrics: Story so far (contd..)

Iris scansuses the features in the iris of the

human eye (blood vessel patterns) Voice recognition

Hand geometry scansUsed in 1996

Olympic games to control access to the

Olympic village, tracking 65000 people

Veins in an individuals palm can be tracked

using infrared radiation


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Biometrics: Future Technologies

Heart Beat authentication

Ear Shape authentication

Body salinity level based authentication

-The level of salinity in humans is used for

authentication as they are said to be unique in

everyones body.

Another technology similar to this is body Odor

recognition, where sensors capture bodys scent

from hands and other intrusive parts of the body.


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2. Browser based Computing: Story so

far

Evolution of online office suites gives usersadvantage of accessing their documentsfrom anywhere.

Desktops became browser-based with theintroduction of Web Operating systems

Services like web-based meetings, sharedonline workspace gained momentum.

Adobe launches online photo editing service


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Browser based Computing: a peek into

future

We are going to see more and more desktop apps

becoming browser based

Adobe has launched a service to edit photos online

Video editing through browser will catch upA

company Jumpcut, recently acquired by Yahoo,

provides basic video editing through browser, and

there are many patents filed for browser-based video

editing.

Vendors are coming up with offline access to web

apps.


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3. Business Intelligence & Analytics:

the story so far

Lots of company acquisitions happened in the BAdomain this year by BI solutions companies.

- Business Objects by SAP, Cognos by IBM,Hyperion Solutions by Oracle, Knightbridge solutionsby HP

Microsoft has released tools that allows you to

analyze business data in excel. Tools are readily available off the shelf for specific

industry verticals. For eg, in a manufacturingscenario, the BA tool would be able to analyze thesupply chain data and quickly predict the demands

or other things from it.


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Business Intelligence & Analytics:

Future trends

To enable different business processes andfunctions to interact with each other, SOA based

applications would be required- (ERP, and CRM etc)

BI solutions are becoming more device friendly. BIsystems identify the type of device thats sending the

BI query. This could for instance be an excel file ifthe query is coming from a PC, or a WAP compatibletable if the query comes from a smart phone, or aSMS if the query comes from a mobile phone.


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4. Open Source: story so far

Linux for IT infrastructure, enterprise businessapplications, desktops, laptops, embedded systems,

and appliances etc. CVS, based on client server architecture.

TorrentsUsing this, one can establish aconnection between two systems over internet andexchange data, helping developers to easily share

their software across the globe. App level firewall is meant to restrict certain

applications to access only those resources that anapplication needs to complete a process


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5. Printing : Story so far

Outsourced printer management has become

popular

Color lasers have become better, faster, and more

affordable for the office

Trendy inkjets and even lasers were launched

Universal printer drivers have become common,

saving a lot of admin hassles

Compact, color laser-based MFPs have hit the

market


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Printing : Fast forward

Wireless printing: Eliminating even the Bluetooth dongle.Universal printer drivers will allow printing from anydeviceprinter, PDA, laptop, mobile phoneas long asthey are placed at a certain distance from printer.

Variable data printing: Large-scale use of VDP to provideultra-personalization beyond compare, arising out of acapacity to print 1000s of copies within minutes, eachpage different from each other.

3D printing: So far, you print on a flat paper. In the future,you print out paper boxes and structures, the way youhave seen themobjects, buildings, and everything inbetween.


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6. Software as a Service : Story so far

What is it: Principle of providing users an access to enterpriseapps over a network, instead of buying and installing expensivepackages.

Independent Software Vendors (ISV) provide SaaS-basedsolutions.

Email, accounting, CRM and HR are few markets where SaaShas been introduced and become a hit.

SalesForce.com for instance, is a dominant player in the SaaSmarket, providing CRM solutions to customers.

Key enterprise business app providers like Oracle andMicrosoft have joined the SaaS bandwagon

A new model called Platform-as-a-Service has sprung up,similar to SaaS, but for developers


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Software as a service :Future trends

SaaS based CRM apps have become successful in the market

There hasnt been a dominant SaaS player in the ERP domain

till date, but with big names like Oracle, SAP and Microsoftentering the market, we might see some action very soon.

There have been speculations that SAP would be launchingtheir ERP products based on the SaaS model mainly to attractthe SMBs.

Platform-as-a-Service: Independent development platform

would be provided enabling developers to create and deliverany kind of business app, entirely on-demand and withoutsoftware.


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7. Service Oriented Architecture: What

is it

It lets enterprises weave together disparate businessapplications such as SCM, ERP or CRM while enabling them tocollaborate each other.

SOA thus becomes an important technology as it solves theproblem of interoperability amongst applications on differentplatforms and also provides a way for data aggregation andcollaboration amongst them.

While SOAP-enabled Web Services (XML over HTTP) are the

most common implementation of SoA, Web Services are notnecessarily required to define a SoA. The protocolindependence of SoA means that different consumers can useservices by communicating with the service in different ways.


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Service Oriented Architecture: Story

so far

Industry specific Maturity models for SOAimplementation emerged

More applications and development platformsbecame SOA compliant.

Microsoft and Sun introduced .NET and Javaspecifications for building SOA compliantapplications

BEA was the 1stto offer a unified SOA basedplatform to integrate business processes,applications and legacy environments for anenterprise.


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Service Oriented Architecture:

Evolving trends & Future predictions

EAI vendors: These are SOA platform vendors, who providedevelopment and integration of the business processes forSOA model based applications. The major market drivers in this

field are IBM, Oracle, BEA and Sun. Some issues like security concerns around Web Services

compliance, management of services etc remain to beimplemented.

By combining Web 2.0 with SOA, would result in creation ofapplications that can be quickly developed and implemented,

and that too at a lower cost with reusability of services. SOA would combine both the service oriented architecture and

the event driven architecture (EDA) whereby software modulesare related to business components based on events and alertsrather than the direct calls among them.


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8. Unified Threat Management : what is

it

A UTM is a single device that provides protectionagainst multiple security threats be it viruses, spam,

network and host intrusions, etc. Its available as ahardware appliance, which can simply be pluggedinto the network and configured.

Their simplicity and speed of deployment has madethem extremely popular amongst organizations.

The best use for UTMs is at the branch office levelwhere you dont have dedicated manpower tomanage security.


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Unified Threat Management : Story so

far

Software UTMs started gaining momentum.

Lots of Open source UTMs became availableapart from the commercial appliances.

UTMs became embedded in desktops andlaptops.

UTMs for home users have also becomeavailable.

Apart from security, you can also configureUTM devices for bandwidth management,

defining policies for a group or individual, etc.


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Unified Threat Management: Future

Push technology: With the help of this new technology, updatesfrom the vendor can be pushed to the UTM device, within aparticular time frame. Presently, a UTM has to pull upgrades

from a central repository which is a disadvantage as the UTMmight miss out on crucial time since a patch has been released.So this technology helps maintain currency.

Stronger UTMs: As newer threats emerge, performance ofUTMs also needs to stay on par. Packets with larger size needto be scanned within seconds.

VoIP traffic: Apart from HTTPS and FTP traffic, VoIP trafficcould also be routed through UTMs. Security has beenincorporated for the popular SIP protocol.

SIP: The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signalling protocolused for establishing sessions in an IP network.


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9. Storage: Glimpses 2007

Hard drive capabilities hit the 1 Terabyte mark.

Tiny personal NAS boxes became ubiquitous this

year. New security standards emerged for encrypting

data at rest, like the IEEE1619.3.

Email archival solutions became widespread

USB based flash drive capabilities exceeded 4 GB.

NAS boxes, Information Lifecycle Management,

Continuous data protection


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Storage: A peek into future

Storage virtualization will be widespread.

Solid state drives in notebooks will become common place.

SSDs are thinner, lighter, and faster, which should improvesystem performance, makes notebooks lighter.

Hard drive capabilities will reach 2 TB+ range for desktops.

Virtual Tape Libraries will become more common.

VTL: It presents a storage component as a tape drive (thatstores computer data on magnetic tape) or library for use withexisting backup software.

Full Disk Encryption or FDE based drives will emerge forstorage security. Performance wont degrade because eachdrive will be handling its own encryption.


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10. Unified Communications: What is it

Unified Communications (UC) is a commonly used term for theintegration of disparate communications systems, media,devices and applications, so that you know the best way to

reach the other party. This potentially includes the integration of fixed and mobile

voice, e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advancedbusiness applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX ((telephoneswitching system within an enterprise), voice messengers, IPphones, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, text

messaging through IMs, and data sharing through collaborationtools like interactive whiteboards into a single environmentoffering the user a more complete but simpler experience.

PBX: Private branch exchange


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Unified Communications: Story so far

SIP has overtaken H.323 to emerge as thefavorite standard in UC devices

Major vendors are offering tools to enableconvergence and tie communications intobusiness processes

There has been a paradigm shift from VoIPto CoIP (Communications over IP) whichmeans loading all kinds of communicationsover your IP network.


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Unified Communications: The road

ahead

Interoperability amongst UC devices: Ciscos IP telephony,unified messaging, , mobility and audio conferencing solutionsare more popular while IBM and Microsoft are preferred for

email, instant messaging and web conferencing. Interoperabilityamongst them is important.

Similar to SaaS, expect Communications as a Service to pickup in a big way as companies try to cut down on infrastructurecosts through hosted solutions.

Users would be able to check all types of messages from a

unified e-mail box, web browser or mobile device, anywhere onthe network.

Companies would prefer open standards such as SIP andSIMPLE to improve on interoperability than H.323, which is stillwidely in use amongst major PBX and IP PBXs.

Increasingly IM systems will be integrated into other corporate

back office systems such asERP, CRM, SFA and SCM.


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11. Virtualization Technologies: What it

is

This technology abstracts the hardware from the Software sothat the hardware appears as one large pool of resources to theothers.

There are several kinds of virtualization: server, storage,application, network, and the latest entrant-desktopvirtualization.

This technology allows multiple Operating systems with theirapplications to be installed on top of a single hardware server.

For eg, if a software tester needs a machine with Windows XP,

Visual Studio and Oracle installed onto it, then one can createsuch a machine in a virtual environment and provide it to tester.


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Virtualization Technologies: Story so

far

Microsoft launched its 1sthypervisor in 2007.

IntelVT: Using this technology, a single CPU

physically acts as if several CPUs are workingtogether, so that the number of guest OSs can behosted simultaneously on the host machine witheach virtual CPU dedicated to one guest OS.

Enhanced security for virtual environments becomes

a must. Virtual tapes are gaining momentum. Data is stored

in hard drives nowadays as compared to beingstored on tapes during previous years.


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Virtualization Appliances

With this technology, one can deploy software

solution in just a couple of minutes.

For eg: if you need to deploy a mail server within

your organization, then there are preconfigured

virtual images available, which you just need to

download from the internet for the respective virtual

machines and then finally run them. This is suited for places where people dont want to

invest time on installation and configuration.


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Virtualization Technologies: Where is it

heading?

In the near future the performance of avirtualized OS or application will be at par

with the performance in the native machine.

Storage virtualization: In this, data is storedwherever it finds free space rather thanseeking space on a single storage device.

Application virtualization: A particularapplication which is not compatible with thenative OS runs such an application within avirtualized environment created upon nativeOS.


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12. Web 2.0 : What is it

Web 2.0 can refer to web-based communities and hostedservices such as social-networking sites, wikis, etc. Alayman can post his views in a blog without having to know a

single word of HTML. Enterprises can leverage the power of Web 2.0integrating

applications in a web browser, allowing users to modify contentin real time, allowing multiple users to interact, aggregatingcontent from other sites into your own, hosting desktops on theweb, providing online videos, audioblogging, webinars,

blogging are just few possibilities. Technologies such as AJAX, Flex, Meshup, Atom, Podcast,

XML, Javascripts, RSS feed, Wiki, P2P and Blog form are thebackbone of Web 2.0.


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Web 2.0 : The story so far

Sites like Orkut, YouTube, and FlickR made socialnetworking over the Web a reality.

All major software vendors of Web 2.0 enable theircollaborative solutions.

Enterprises started adding features like blogging,RSS feeds, and Wiki into their own portals for theiremployees.

The concept of Web OSs came into the market,allowing users to access any operating systemthrough a web browser.


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Web 2.0 : A peek into the future

Semantic Web also termed as Web 3.0 might see its

existence, where computers will be capable of

understanding information and performing tedioustasks such as finding, sharing, and combining on

web.

Web based calendar application will intelligently

arrange your schedules based on inputs from otherscalendars minus any inputs from the user himself.


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Web 2.0 : A peek into the future

(contd..)

FM radio station streaming, which will select

contents as Podcast, so as to make your friends

know that your voice was heard on-air when yourequested for a song.

Semantic web developers coming out with a new

XML format.

Mobile 2.0, convergence of technology in mobilehandheld device would make a huge impact.

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