2010 Predictions

Annual prognostications are typically overly optimistic, so for 2010’s soothsaying I’ve opted for a more pragmatic approach.

Austerity drives innovations in doing more with less – The 2009 budgetary hangovers while I expect to less restrictive this year, will drive nearly all purchasing decisions this year. A need to demonstrate obvious and immediate on any return on investments will be a pressing concern for any sales cycles.

Data Services provides the after burner for the Services Model – whether data is serviced or exposed to either the web or mobile platform driven by the full spectrum of applications. A host of challenges and opportunities exist here which I expect to become mainstream this year. Look out for both platform, OS and component based solutions to this

Business Intelligence (BI) – I’ll call this the exabyte (EB)-problem, or perhaps the zetabyte problem would be more appropriate. As the sheer volume of data across the internet reaches unmanageable, opportunities and worries abound. Commodity data warehousing exposes many more to be more agile with BI output, which will separate separate the winners from the losers.

Networks will buckle under the strain – Either mobile or fixed line, all indicators point to continued and healthy growth in data volumes, and the lack of consistent and reliable investment in it for the core infrastructure to keep up with demand will be exposed on numerous occasions.

Cloud & Virtualization platforms – The past few years has seen virtualization, and by extension cloud viewed increasingly interesting potential. These new platforms have been to date deployed for highly targeted, functional purposes, but 2010 will see not only broader utilization, but more comprehensive offerings. Read <a href="this for more.

JPA Renaissance – ORMs for the Java platform have been around for year, and JPA is certainly popular. This decade’s Java platform programmers ‘think’ data access in terms of ORMs, and the successful ones will realize that the real comparison for a JPA implementations comparison lies with the engine that drives it – the JDBC driver. See the embedded video for more for more.

Application Reformation – numerous software stacks could easily suffer a non-feature release in 2010. By this, end-users will see minimal feature deltas but a focus on in reliability performance and application through put. Architects and developers alike will be forced to make major investments outside of the usual feature buckets to meet previously unheard of performance metrics

We are now at the threshold of full scale parallel programming in a meaningful way – multi-core programming libraries will mature across all major platforms (Closures with Java, Parallels with .NET and numerous others for native platforms.)
Virtualization adoption with the accelerants of economic and productivity concerns are driving applications stacks towards zero tolerance for inefficient software. One or more inefficient software layers could easily drag down an entire virtualization strategy.
Cloud Computing pushes a software efficiency requirements to new bounds as it’s inherent utility model demands and will drive this. Innovators who can find ways of and building product which do the same (and potentially more work) in cloud computing environments while consuming less cloud computing power and/or infrastructure will be clear winners in 2010.

predictions

2010 Predictions

Jonathan Bruce