2011 Predictions

After 2010, the economic resonance is a greater sense of optimism, possibility and a pent up sense of innovation is about to be unleashed across a whole breed of startups and areas that I didn't see coming last year. In my last set of projections I managed to stay more or less on message but this year, the goal is be more specific and concise

• Data – not just storage, but movement, cleansing, quality, analysis of this data is going to fuel a whole new genre of applications and innovations.

• Data in of itself is not that interesting – the source of the data growth I think will draw the attention of a new wave of applications. Making sense of the both the growth of social data, associated location data and the effective managing the source of referential data integrity - the social graph, offers both huge opportunity but potentially huge push back for those who suddenly find their data used in ways they never suspected.

• Patterns and practices in how best to processing of data will also shift. Typical go-to technologies such ACID database are going to find themselves out paced by technologies such as NoSQL, Cassandra, and FlockDB, HBase all of which will greater and broader usage outside of the bleeding edge conference circuit. The notion and acceptability of BASE data persistence will cause some opinions to shift.

• Efficiently moving this data out of large processing platforms such around Map-Reduce, or data warehouse BI applications into contexts that makes sense for today's decision makers will be critical. Presenting this data in new, and thought provoking ways will take shape in several forms, including this and this.

• Enterprises will be unable to wait around for the traditional grid iron vendors to allow them deal with this data growth, although there has certainly been some movement on this front. I think it's therefore reasonable to expect that we will see enterprises looking elsewhere to move, process, analyze and allow them to articulate new and previously impractical business hypothesis over almost unimaginable data sets. There are already some interesting emerging success stories on this front.

• SQL data sources, that exist exclusively on the cloud will gain increased credibility, acceptability and competition, and will see critical deployments across verticals that 3 years ago would never have considered such a mode. The economics of scale, and cost control associated with the underlying elasticity will correctly be irresistible. We are unfortunately also likely to see major security compromises that may scare early adopters, however this will be a necessary step as this new genre in data sources matures.

• Skills required to succeed in this new data challenge will also change. This includes skills required by from the individual contributed level, to developers, to CTOs. The killer combination will be marrying the best practices of data access and processing from today with the new tools at their disposal.

• Java Community Buckles and Fractures – the seeds have been sown for major eruptions in the Java community, and the harmony it has enjoyed will be due to a number of well documented causes, but the effect will be to divide the attention of developers. Java as platform which had for so many years focused and energized a broad based community serving numerous interests will find its support more distributed over frameworks and business platform for tuned and nimble for today's challenges.

• The HTML5 evolving standard with IndexDB will offer a new set of opportunities for dealing with data in a distributed way, plus it will be boon to SaaS providers who have to every day walk the line between providing 365x24x7 uptime but need to find ways to balance the load.

• Acceptability of Software Updates Pervades Everything – With SaaS models now gaining broad based acceptability, customers now have expectation for more discrete, more fluid set of features that are market ready, and hardened for production challenges. The difference here is that this downstream set of upgraded will touch each layer of software, even software that lives almost exclusively within the ire firewall.